


Another Life To Live

by Medorikoi



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: BBC Sherlock - Freeform, Child Abuse, Kid Fic, PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-05-30
Updated: 2012-11-04
Packaged: 2017-10-19 22:40:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 33
Words: 74,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Medorikoi/pseuds/Medorikoi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'It was almost as if he had died, to look into the eyes of a three year old Sherlock and know that they no longer shared a past, that the memories lived on only in himself. But what if this time could be better? What if this time he could protect him?'</p><p>What started as a quick prompt of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson being turned into children has completely escaped its original mold and has gone on to examine the lives they originally endured as children and the way they learn to survive this time together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Mycroft had increased the manpower of the watch on his younger brother the moment he laid eyes, however removed, on John Watson. He received reports of a flat mate, of a flurry of activity on Baker street, but the words were only basic observations, unwilling to write hypothesis, unable to comprehend the greater picture. Good help was so hard to find when your own standards appear to be to the rest of the world- super human. Of course he had a back check done on the Doctor, knew everything about the man, everything he had ever done and a fair idea of what he would do before he ever saw the first images from Baker Street, the first images of his baby brother in the presence of this man.

The news of the imminent flat mate came as something of a shock, if shock was an emotion Mycroft had ever truly experienced. Sherlock could, if he compromised his own standard for what he defined as a worth while case, easily make the rent. A handful of pieced together moments sending out the post with simple conclusions to cases could have afforded him more decadent rooms than he had chosen. And Mycroft had, although he knew the matter of pride would never allow it, offered more than once to pay for Sherlock's lodging. Money after all is nothing more than a pedestrian coil, it would be a simple matter to free his brother of such paltry thoughts.

When the first images of the duo came into his possession Mycroft did something he had in the course of his life rarely done. He second guessed himself. The facts were laid out before his eyes, tangible and real but it was so incredibly improbable that despite the evidence he found himself doubting the truth. He needed more proof to confirm.

It was a short video clip, the audio was so poor as to be inconsequential and long enough into the duos relationship that Mycroft knew he had, despite the miniature world crisis he had avoided in the mean time, let his priorities slip. A failure he would not tolerate in himself again.

An orange shock blanket hung loosely on his brothers shoulders, relenting to the need of those around him to protect while simultaneously displaying how unnecessary their insistence was. He was thinking aloud, his mind whirring. Mycroft could see the shock in his brother, the way it had slowed his mind, the way he had allowed the adrenalin to cloud his perceptions to be nearly comparable to the great unwitting masses. And then his eyes shifted and focused, he stopped talking, and for a moment he let the impenetrable mask he had worn all of their lives slip.

It felt like a horrible betrayal to witness it, like a voyeur watching the most intimate moment of a lifetime. Like unwittingly watching the act of your own conception.

Mycroft felt a blush rise on his own checks, feeling the moment as keenly as if it were his own, as if the thought in Sherlock's mind were being whispered directly into his own ear.

He witnessed the moment Sherlock was changed irreparably.

The moment he laid his eyes on John Watson standing across the street and knew not only what he had done, and what he was capable of, but what they would be together.

His face filled with something so incredibly human that Mycroft wondered if there had ever been a moment of such exquisite humanity written on his brother's cold features since the day their father had died.

The orange blanket, his succession to humanity, was pulled and held tight around his shoulders by purposefully shaking hands. He muttered a few lost words to the police inspector but his eyes were trained on the figure just coming into the background of the screen. His mind already there with him.

The two figures spoke for a moment, intense and calm and real. Like both had been just slightly uncomfortable while apart and had found something in each other which made a comfort of existing.

And then Sherlock did something Mycroft had not seen since they were very, very, young and the memories had all but faded from even his great mind.

He smiled.

He smiled as if he were actually happy.


	2. Chapter 2

Mycroft knew the danger his brother was in, knew that the men he was tracking had roots deep into places where the light of day would fear to tread. But there was no proof that these men, this surface of a much darker creature had access to the heart of the beast. The men Sherlock was tracking had never set foot in a level 4 hot zone, they had never gazed at the strains of virus under an electric microscope, never witnessed flesh die or mutate on a cellular level.

There should never have been any real danger.

But by the time he found the leak in his own department and…extracted him, by the time he knew what information had been divulged…

It is after all better to wound than to kill. To distract the enemy, make him tend to the fallen.

Sherlock had been given no warning, no clue that the game had changed.

He would never know.

Mycroft had sent every trustworthy soul, every marksman, every good man or woman under his control and even more telling, he had gone himself, but when he walked through the splintered door of 221B Baker Street the only people willing to look him in the eye were two small boys wrapped in each other's arms.

Mycroft quickly took in the scene before him. The two bodies which lay sprawled on the ground, no longer bleeding, bodies cooling as the processes of the body slowly dwindled and stopped, the small perfect holes in their chests, the pool of crimson which joined and engulfed them and seeped like a sentient creature closer to where the two children sat now engulfed in a sea of crimson. Darts devoid of their payload lay on the ground, one across the room where it had been removed and abandoned at the beginning of the ensuing fight, the other a stones toss from the boys, where the bloody imprint of small fingers could still be seen on the clean glinting metal.

The dried tears on their cheeks which had no brethren in clear dry eyes.

Mycroft felt the wave of grief crash over him, the nausea threatening to pull him under, sinking his body down onto a couch possibly contaminated with a level 4 hot agent.

Tearstained blue-grey eyes as piercing and terrible as their fathers peered at him from under locks of curling black hair from an ocean of blood.

These children had not had time to cry.

These tears belonged to the last moments of his brother's life, proof that the serum took cruel short minutes to work.

Long enough to fight, to try and protect the only person who had ever seemed to matter.

Time enough to fail. To watch the dart sink into soft yielding flesh.

Mycroft could see it in his mind's eye even as willed the images away and allowed himself the foolish human motion of pressing his palms into his eyes, willing it to disappear by force if not by mind.

Sherlock never cried. Not real tears. He swore that no one would ever be able to hurt him that badly again.

But he could see them even now over the bodies of these children.

He lad long enough left as himself to fail his partner, his friend.

Long enough to know their fate, whatever it may be, would be shared.

Long enough to say goodbye and at long last let humanity touch him and let the mask he wore fall in pieces upon the ground. To let that great heart show.

Long enough to break free of the past and understand maybe for the first time what he stood to lose.

Those tears were the last remnants of the brother he had lost.

Around him his teams were moving into position, carrying out their tasks but no one moved towards the two boys.

Mycroft let his hands fall from his face and knelt, his knees falling carelessly into the blood, the cloth wicking it up his leg.

Sherlock was no one's responsibility but his own. His to protect, and now, to care for.

He reached out, his hands encircling the child wrapped absurdly in a dress shirt and went to lift him but small hands fisted in soft cloth, arms went tight around the blond boy who had not escaped Mycroft's attention but had not been the focus of his pain.

The boy for his part fished his arms out of the swaddled cloth and through the neck of the jumper, pale arms wrapping around Sherlock's small chest, around his back and pressing their cheeks together with the ferocity with which they held one another.

For the span of a heartbeat Mycroft felt a thrill of something shining and unstoppable, something almost approaching hope.

Test results had been inconclusive.

Some animals not seeming to retain their memories while others continued on in their daily routine with only the slightest hesitation in their actions to indicate rediscovery and subsequent memory regeneration.

Mycroft slid closer, deeper into the blood, reaching not with his hands but his arms by which he could grasp both boys.

His brother's name was on his lips, as he settled the two babes against his chest and in his lap. But the sounds were uncharacteristically frozen within his chest as he watched small delicate hand reach forward and touch the bare skin of the other boy in a moment of reassurance and tenderness.

The name died on his lips.

For once, Mycroft found he did not want to know.


	3. Chapter 3

Three more men were brought into his custody and subsequently disposed of. Each man he found led him back to another until the every individual who had known about the existence of Sherlock Holmes in the guilty syndicate was rendered mute. It did not improve matters but it made the situation at hand slightly more tolerable.

Terabytes of information came into his possession, teams of his own scientists and defectors from the enemy, the most brilliant minds the world had to offer where brought in, sequestered and told that anything in the world they needed would be theirs. But Mycroft knew better than to imagine a favorable outcome.

He had, after all, seen the biological makeup of the agent.

It had been less than a day, a mere 23 hours since he had taken Sherlock into his arms and the two boys had finally felt safe enough to collapse into a deep sleep.

Thankfully had stayed asleep the past 23 hours, a sleep which he was assured, which was both necessary and normal. Normal. Sometimes his scientists had the most peculiar sense of humor.

The boys had been returned to him by Anthea immediately after their examinations. He had been at loathing to let the boys fall from his site but his assistant was more than capable of watching two unconscious children. The medical data that had been attained was predictably unhelpful but at least minimally reassuring.

The weapon seemed to have dissipated from all tested bodily tissues, the process (he found himself unwilling to think de-aging) had halted after its initial effects and their young bodies seemed to be unharmed.

No official tests could be done to determine the exact age of the two but Mycroft remembered all too well how Sherlock looked as his very formidable three year old self. The battles that marked their childhood etched into his mind.

But now, as he looked at the two sleeping boys dressed in plain children's hospital gowns but blessedly free of blood laid upon his dark leather couch he fancied that perhaps things would be different this time around. They looked…angelic. Unlined, innocent faces wiped clean of lifetimes of hardships and peaceful in their slumber.

How could the Sherlock lying so quietly be the same boy to set fire to the kitchen on his third birthday?

The fleeting foolish hope of prolonged peace died when a blue grey eye peered carefully up at him. His small body unmoving, the rise and fall of his chest stilling as if he believed he could be invisible if only he lay very still. They both knew of course that he had been caught.

Sherlock abandoned all pretense of sleep, dragging his little body up to sit on the couch, his legs at first splayed out in front of him as young children are wont to do, unclad and childish feet unable to do more than touch the end of the seat cushion, and then as if disturbed by the open position folded them beneath himself. His dark curls framed his face in perfect ringlets and slid from his eyes as he lifted his face to view Mycroft unabashedly, eyes that made Mycroft wonder how much of his brother remained in this child with such ancient eyes.

They would have stayed like that forever, the two brothers separated by a lifetime and each unwilling to divest what they knew if not for the soft muffled whine from the other boy still asleep beside them.

Sherlock's mass of curls bobbed as he turned quickly towards John, two sets of cold blue eyes watching as a hand uncurled itself and reached out on the precipice of sleep and wakefulness, trying to find something to grasp onto.

Mycroft watched as the small boy who had stared so harshly at him moments ago reached out a tentative hand with the utmost care. They both watched as the blond shifted, uttering a childish coo of contentment as tiny fingers entwined and grasped and held onto the proffered hand.

There was a flicker of emotion hidden in a veil of black hair, a softness, before blue eyes were once again on Mycroft.

Bolstered by John's sleepy trust in him Sherlock now looked on Mycroft with annoyance and silent fuming frustration, as if he had willed the boy to wake. Another moment passed between them and Mycroft's chair gave a soft squeak as he shifted his weight.

His free hand flew to his face, a tiny finger pressed harshly to his lips with a pout that would have been masterful on an adult and became almost obscene on Sherlock's childish features.

Mycroft found that he had opened his mouth to apologize before he had realized what he was doing. He stopped abruptly and closed his mouth but it was too late. Blue eyes stared up at him; mouth still twisted in a frustrated pout but there was a glint in his eyes that was not there before. They both knew what he had been about to say, that he had fallen for it, smartest man in London defeated by the pout and wit of a three year old.

When their eyes linked Mycroft knew that their battle of wills was over, he knew what the first words spoken between them would be now that now that a lifetime stood between them and memories no longer bound them.

Sherlock looked down at his self appointed charge and tightened his hand almost imperceptibly around the other boys', looking up at Mycroft with a quark of his lips so very Sherlock it was equal parts scowl and smirk.

"Shouldn't have had all those cookies."


	4. Chapter 4

Whether it was repressed memories imposing themselves over his new reality or the deductions of his young mind reassuring him that this man was safe Sherlock was slightly more forthcoming after he had bested Mycroft.

Given a panel of several names he was able to choose both his and Johns names accurately, even if he chose his own with the slightest wrinkling of his nose. When prompted he was also able to give Mycroft a rendition of his own name without a selection of choices but purely from memory. Mycroft had a suspicion that it was not memory loss that made Sherlock insist that his name was pronounced something along the lines of 'My-cough'.

But when asked what their relationships were, how they knew each other, Mycroft received a look of borderline panic.

Sherlock knew who he was but he was adrift without knowing his place in the world.

There was more than one instance where Mycroft believed he had pushed the child too far at last, that he would break into tears or cry for his mother but Sherlock had never been so ordinary. When the sensation of overwhelming panic flooded his eyes and frenzied his movements Sherlock would crush Johns hand in his own, and John, giving man that he was, would sleep on.

Sherlock had no recollection of what had happened. Mycroft prompted the boy to tell him what he did that day but he stayed mum on the subject. Subjects of far passed, last birthday, last week, brought on just the shaking of his head, the tossing of black curls striking his pale face. Innocent and painless unknowing. But to speak of Baker Street, of darts and syringes, to hint at blood, at bodies, of why John still slept so soundly even now, brought a dark look to his pale blue eyes. Like a shadow passing over the sun.

Mycroft pushed, wanting to know if Sherlock remembered the attack, if he remembered being an adult, remembered changing. But suddenly, heart-stoppingly Mycroft was reminded that however mature and brilliant he may act, the boy in front of him was little more than a frightened babe.

Mycroft had been debating whether to show the boy pictures of the crime scene his own living room had become when his attention was stolen away by a strangled breath. Sherlock had pulled his knees to his chest, tightening his white hospital gown around himself, burying his face in his knees and black curls.

When Mycroft reached out a hand to comfort, to touch his shoulder, his hair, Sherlock pulled away. Grey eyes clear and focused as they stared into him, peering above his legs Sherlock told him the only thing he did remember. The only thing he wanted to remember.

His baby hand reached out and grabbed John who had woken when his hand hold had been taken away. The blond had blinked sleepily between the two of them, taking a moment to watch and observe. But when Sherlock's hand grasped his with desperation he did not hesitate. It was less than a second for John to sit up and wrap an arm around Sherlock's curled form, placing his small body between the two brothers even as he woke from the depths of sleep. Sherlock unraveled his tangled body and pulled John into his embrace, protecting as he was protected.

Mycroft barley heard the words uttered in a voice so much softer than the Sherlock he had known.

"Mine."


	5. Chapter 5

As soon as John woke up Mycroft no longer existed for the little boy, no longer merited the breath he wasted to speak to him. All of his questions went unnoticed, or rather, ignored as two sets of eyes stared up at him as if he were nothing more intelligent than or less imposing than Big Ben towering above them.

It was when Mycroft turned to his computer to start the process of ending a life, the paperwork, the every lost thread of life that must be severed and tied that he heard the first whispers begin.

 

"John?" Sherlock abandoned his upset posture and folded his legs underneath himself once more, his voice coming in a soft childish whisper.

The blond boy nodded, letting his now empty arm fall to his side. His eyes darted between the boy in front of him and the strange man in the corner. Satisfied his companion was safe from the grownup who had upset him up he let his legs splay in front of him so that the tips of his feet touched the other boys knees and gave a little nod in response to the question.

Sherlock pursed his lips and a line appeared between his eyebrows, creasing in frustration.

"And you know me?" He had meant the words to come as frustrated as he felt but fear tangled with his voice, making it waiver ever so slightly until it sounded soft and fragile in the air.

" 'course." John offered him a smile and another nod, wanting to make the look of ill-suppressed fear fall from his friends face and wondering why anyone would ask such a silly question.

" You're Sher'ock."

The lines of worry marking Sherlock's face disappeared and the beaming smile he received from the sullen brunette was enough to prompt John into continuing.

"You're my…" His mouth fell open for a moment as if to speak but he could not find the words, he shut it abruptly, chewing on his lip as he tried to think. The smile was already fading from his face, the edges of his mouth turning down into a pout. He had not meant to upset him, he would rather do anything in the world rather than do that.

"You're my Sher'ock" He finished finally, deciding it was enough of an answer.

The brunettes' eyes widened until John could scarcely look away, his pale grey eyes betraying all the emotions his face barely registered. Finally with a small secretive smile Sherlock leaned forward.

"Tell me everything you know."

 

Three days had passed since the 'incident'. There was no progress from the teams of scientists, each expert baffled by what they were seeing, each individual awe inspired and petrified by the implications. No one on those teams knew that there were human casualties, he would make sure none of them ever found out. The terabytes of stolen research data held not even the vague idea of an antidote.

Even if they could find a cure by the time it was ready for human trials these children would be grown again. And even if by some miracle, by some chance of fate and terrible happenstance they found a cure, would it be better to bring them back to themselves when all the clues pointed at a second uninflected chance at life?

A John Watson who would never know the cold biting embrace of war.

A Sherlock Holmes who would not know what it meant to be utterly alone.

Mycroft had expected the boys to grow rowdy as the days passed and they became used to their surroundings and more comfortable with him.

But as time wore on the two boys refused to speak. After the first abrupt conversation with Sherlock he had been unable to draw a word from either of them, suffering their accusing glares in silence. He did not fear that they had digressed to the point of being unable to speak, in fact they seemed to have developed a language all their own. In the way that twins sometimes do the two boys had begun to communicate in a way even Mycroft could not decipher. A mix of broken words and whispered sounds paired with gestures and looks that seemed to speak novels of eternity.

As he worked halfheartedly to reinstate them to their natural state and began to unrepentantly close down what had been the accumulation of two lives work the two children drew with the colored pens given to them from desk drawers, destroying the evidence of their creations before any adult dared to look. They spent nights laying together on Mycroft's large couch, hiding beneath the blanket they shared, pulling it over their heads to whisper into the heat of their shared darkness.

After a week the silence between them had grown cold and accusatory. The words felt thick and childish in his mouth, like a cruel ploy when he began to speak in front of the boys in a Latin he imagined they might not understand. As childish as it felt to separate them by yet another language at heart there was no reason to let the boys hear the reminder of blood and death and their own destroyed lives.

Alone with them he felt the silence building in the back of his throat, as if these hours, these days spent in his office were more poignant than they had ever been when he was alone.

It was time to give up.

Time to take them home.

He called Anthea into the room, ignoring the way Sherlock stared into him, ignored the way his small body was held unnaturally rigid, John as ever at his side, clutching his small hand. He needed preparations to be made, for their few accumulated articles of clothing to be packed, for child car seats of all things.

Sherlock was in a fury. He pulled at John, rushing them towards the table that they lingered beneath knowing that Mycroft could not reach them there. There was the rustle of paper and they emerged again, Sherlocks small bare feet stomping upon the carpeted floor, fist clutching at a paper so tightly that it was rippling in his grasp.

He stood as tall as his body would let him, his eyes fierce and blazing as John stood bravely if uncomfortably by his side. The drawing was offered to him.

Mycroft took the crumpled paper from the child's grasp and held it as if it were a priceless artifact and might disintegrate beneath the gentlest touch.

Johns work, obviously.

Days old. A picture which he had tried again and again without consciously meaning to.

Sherlock pressed his shoulder into Johns, not pushing him away but needing to be closer, to accuse more forcefully with all the words he refused to say.

Two men in blood. An ocean of red. And there in the middle two figures drawn so simply, so honestly. Two boys peering of the page, their smiles misplaced in the bloody landscape and seeping into Mycroft's mind.

"Why?"


	6. Chapter 6

Mycroft kneels so that the too serious eyes of the three year old in front of him are level with his own. His body protest weakly, every one of his years pressing heavily down on him, the pang of unfit muscles. That will have to change.

Sherlock is unrepentant, black curls framing his pale face so that he is deceptively beautiful, so seemingly innocent. A face Botticelli might have painted.

Mycroft looks into Johns clear brown eyes and is struck by the lingering pain set into them as integral and factual as their color.

He has made a mistake.

All the facts and clues and theories had taken over. A whirlwind of human panic drowned out by the supremely logical, statistics overshadowing what should have been apparent all along.

"There was an accident." His kept his voice soft and purposeful but free of superfluous inflection so often used on the young. He would not patronize them now.

The drawing hung between them like the Berlin wall, so light a thing that it hung delicately in his grown hands but it seemed to have the presence of a living creature, its red lines searing into the eyes.

"I should have been there to protect you. I should have kept them away from you." Mycroft searched their faces for a reaction to his admittance of guilt but they were as still as the paintings they resembled, ethereal in their stolidity.

A rueful quark of the lips threatened to ruin his own meticulously arranged expression.

They already knew.

Deduced in facts and human reactions, filtered through the minds and perceptions of a three year old.

What child would not know that an adult should protect the young?

"There was a chance, I had…hoped" He took a deep breath as if a great anguish had suddenly come upon him and settled deep within his chest. "-that through shock or the physical result of what happened you might forget. But you haven't, have you?"

The smile that he let curl his lips was bitter but the sadness and despair in his eyes did not hold a trace of pity.

"In fact if I am correct, and I presume I am, it is the first and last thing you remember of your lives excluding your time here." Sherlock tried so hard to remain passive but his eyes betrayed him, unused to hiding behind mental walls, defenseless; and Johns face had become so open Mycroft almost ached to look on him.

"You know people, names and personalities perhaps but not why or how you know them. Perhaps places will be familiar, objects, but none of it has a history." Mycroft knew the moment the words were out of his mouth that his conjectures were correct.

"It was cruel and unfair of me to keep you so in the dark." Some of the ache building in his chest faded at the admission. Never in all of their years together had he uttered these words to Sherlock, and now that it seemed too late the apologies came all too easily.

"Two men-" He laid the picture on the ground between them, letting the drawn pool of blood to spread across his own floor. "These two men -attacked you and they died for their mistake." He tore his eyes from the parchment, looking for some reaction in the boys but they remained a united force, waiting silently for him to continue.

"The darts, with which you were attacked, contained an unknown substance. I have people working on deciphering it but it is unlikely you will ever regain the memories you have lost." He hesitated for the fraction of a second, the span of a heartbeat. He knew how much they had lost, how meaningful those words should be, but they would never be made aware of it. "I am sorry."

The boys looked at one another, one of the looks that betrayed only the fact that entire conversations were being held in confident silence. Together, moving as one without any outward signal they turned back to Mycroft. Sherlock's purposefully blank face had dropped and the anger seemed to have been forgotten. For a moment he chewed on his bottom lip and then stopped himself as he drew his little shoulders up.

"And now?" He asked in a voice that tried so very hard not to be frightened.

"And now we go home." Mycroft let his knees sink fully to the ground, trying not to betray how hard his heart was beating, how his hands shook ever so slightly with nerves as he held out his arms in a profoundly human gesture.

It was John who took a tentative step forward and wrapped the fingers of his free hand around Mycroft's fingers. John who smiled as if everything in the world would be alright and stepped again, leading Sherlock into Mycroft's embrace.

After the confrontation the boys had deemed Mycroft worthy of speech, that is to say, Sherlock lifted the ban on conversing with him. Ruefully Mycroft wished that they had decided to do so after they had been strapped into their unnecessarily intricate car seats in the limo which had been modified to carry their new cargo.

Still feeling very much equal to his task of caring for two boys Mycroft had carried the children down to the car himself, unwilling to use the main elevator or watch them navigate their small bodies down the steep stairs.

No longer guarded and carrying the heavy burden of his first memories so closely to his heart John was proving to be…effortlessly endearing. He let Sherlock chatter to him in their secreted language, always seeming to offer a sweet smile or tightening his eternal hold on the other boy at exactly the right moment, even ensconced in Mycroft's arms.

Bolstered by his success Mycroft waved off Antheas offer of help to strap the two children into their seats. Believing that John would give him no trouble he set the boy down in the car and set Sherlock into his seat, ignoring the suddenly sullen expression on his face as he pulled the straps over the small chest.

If John had been poorly suppressing a smile and giggling behind his hands while Mycroft strapped him in it was, he believed, a fair assumption to have imagined they were both simply overly tired and showing the ill effects.

He realized quite suddenly with a sick feeling that was becoming all too rapidly the norm that he would have to reevaluate his aptitude with the current situation and his ability to singlehandedly care adequately for two children.

John laughed freely as Mycrofts eyes darted from the empty child's seat to where Sherlock had accessed the control panel to the front cab and was currently trying to wriggle his small body through the open glass pane and into the drivers' seat.


	7. Chapter 7

He would have to have one of the guest bedrooms modified to accommodate the two children. He had thought fleetingly of giving the boys two separate rooms, he certainly had the space, but when Sherlock had only chosen to settle in the car when his seat was placed within an arms reach of John the idea of even an illusion of separation had become intolerable.

The two boys lay thankfully asleep, small bodies disappearing into the king sized mattress, the dark duvet swallowing all but the hint of gold and black tangles upon the white pillow they shared.

They were safe and protected. No criminal knew where he called home.

That knowledge did not stop him from taking his laptop into the room and settling into the oversized armchair in the corner.

Not only did he need, as loathing as he was to admit it, advice. But there were two lives which had gone off the map, and even in a life as closed as Sherlock's there are people to leave behind. Some people who could perhaps, under the right circumstances, be entrusted with a fragment of the truth.

Mycroft was pulling up phone records, surveillance logs, and reports from placed informants, trying to ascertain how much time he had to contact each individual before a feeling of unease finally interrupted their menial thoughts. He had just barely sent out an email from John's personal account informing the Yard in a hurried and yet polite manner that they would be out of town for an undetermined amount of time when he heard it.

It was a sound that had filtered through his unconscious mind as the boys rested rooms away from where he worked, and had driven his subconscious to keep them with him despite everything. A sound which instilled a deep, terrifying need to keep them where he could protect them.

But he could not protect them from their dreams.

The screen on his laptop flicked black in front of him, unused for exactly seven minutes under his petrified hands.

The room fell into darkness, the world becoming one of deep subdued blues and the milky gleam of white and silver.

He had let his emotions overtake his mind, let the barriers erected to protect himself shield him from what was happening before his very eyes. He was failing him all over again.

Sherlock twisted restlessly in his sleep. The blanket twisted in his legs and crumbled in on itself, betraying its contents, the face of a child twisted in a nightmare, black lashes stark against too pale cheeks.

The sound of his soft, subdued sobs had only ever held life when the logical mind had gone to sleep and the last vestiges of forced strength had disappeared. The sound was bitten off and choked, as if even ensconced in sweet darkness and oblivion he fought the unseen with bitter resolve.

Mycroft sat trapped beneath the machinery of his adult life and the onslaught of memories from his own youth as the sound of crying and the glisten of unfelt tears reached into his mind and remorselessly pulled into garish clarity the childhood he had tried so hard to rise above.

He should protect him.

He should have protected him.

Sherlock writhed on the bed, small limbs tortured. Only feet separated them, a measure of space, and yet the pressing of years pinned Mycroft in place like a butterfly pinned to the table, his pounding heart beginning to drown out the soft gasps of his baby brother.

Another thrash, another haunted memory come dream, brought a small curled hand against the baby flesh of Johns chest.

Unseen but undeniably true, brown eyes opened into the darkness of the night, waking into the strange twilight of years and time. Small, delicate hands which had not yet felt the ravages of war or worked desperately to revive the fallen reached out like a streak of moonlight or the tentative whispers of a dream to lay on Sherlock's twisted face.

The sound, the soft terrible echo of lifetimes passed, dissolved under the child's innocent touch. Eyes, which would be in this light, the most stunning shade of grey ice blue, opened to find the only person in existence who continued to make any sense.

Two small hands brushed away the fading evidence of tears and held him in the unselfconscious way we forget as we age.

There was, in the air, the comfortable silence of the breathing of small children, the heavy comfort of wet salt tears and warmth which inexplicably could be felt on the skin and in the mind.

There was only one sound left as the moment broke and the two boys fell into one another, lost once more to the press of blankets and tangling arms. A single sob the likes of which Mycroft had never heard.

It was not the sound of despair or of secreted pain, but the resonance of sweet cathartic surrender and wordless comfort.


	8. Chapter 8

When at long last Mycroft's heart had stopped pounding and the sounds surging to the forefront of his mind had been mastered and subdued he lay the laptop down and escaped the room where two boys lay if not peacefully, than restfully asleep. Hours had passed and the first milky steams of sunlight were filtering into the room to dance into the crevices of lingering darkness.

As seemed to be happening all too often in the past few days and so rarely before in the long years of his life, Mycroft found himself changing his mind from the resolute course had had already set. His priority would not be informing those left behind, or putting away in secreted vaults the remnants of a life forsaken, or even the work which had dominated the majority of his adult life.

His priorities had changed in spite of the rest of the world which may need him. Two little boys needed him more.

He would not fail them.

The room in which they slept was barren, the clothes in which they lived were ill fit remnants from the grown children of employees, the toys with which they played were broken cell phones and printer paper, pens and books written in languages they had never heard of. They existed in a world without material comfort, with nothing tailored to them except for themselves.

Two calls had to be made. One was simple. Instructions to an employee who was grateful to hear from him and more than willing to help. It was as simple as sending a car and the transformation would be underway.

The second call required significantly more self sacrifice and dedication.

Mycroft closed his eyes. At night, when he closed his eyes in exhaustion hoping that a depleted body would stave off dreams and festering thoughts, and all the times during the day in which he allowed his mind to wander he saw in his minds eye two boys in blood. He heard the screams that had yet to be remembered.

He took another breath and reminded himself that he had created and stopped wars, that he had made a thousand calls which would be more important individually than the sum of a more ordinary individual's entire life.

A shout and the thump of two sets of feet were the only warning he received before the door ripped open and two boys came tearing out with smiles upon their faces and their hair in sleep mused tangles. They disappeared as quickly as they had arrived but the thunder of ungraceful feet betrayed their position until they reemerged a moment later into the hallway struggling with their arms full of couch cushions and blankets. The door to the bedroom slammed behind them with a finalistic thud, the wood muffling the sound of their frantic chaos.

Mycroft flipped open his phone and looked at the image on the screen.

Mummy would not be pleased.

 

The older woman was escorted into one of the living rooms which had the lingering feel of a museum, priceless and untouched. Three cardboard boxes followed her into the room and lay about her feet as if her personality had simply imposed itself on the landscape. She stood when Mycroft entered the room and a motherly if upset smile graced her lips.

"I presume they are safe then? You were not exactly revealing on the phone. And with circumstances as they are…I do worry dear."

Mycroft ignored the comment and glanced at the boxes, half wishing he would not have to discover the contents. The sound of children was muffled by the layers of thick insulation and there had been no trace of the duo since they had barricaded themselves into their room hours ago.

When the woman made it clear by her posture she would not let the conversation continue until she had been reassured Mycroft gestured at a chair and sat down heavily himself.

"I assure you your tenants are safe Mrs. Hudson, but it seems that our situation has changed somewhat."

With a satisfied nod the woman sat and picked worriedly at the hem of her sleeve, hands accustomed to being busy, to endless cups of tea and reassuring touches. She had seen the disaster at 221B before the scene had been managed, it would take more than words to assure her.

"I will no longer require you to report Sherlock's activities to me but I hope that you will be amiable to a slightly modified contract." She frowned at what she thought was obviously over obtuse language, impervious it seemed to the self important and ominous manner in which he held himself. He continued undeterred, Sherlock routinely surrounded himself with surprising humans.

"For the time being I would like to keep the flat untouched, paid for in cash at whatever routine basis you deem most satisfactory."

"And the boys?" Mrs. Hudson continued to glance down into one of the boxes from which Mycroft could see the white chalky gleam of a human skull. Worry was evident in her voice.

In another time Mycroft would have been amused to hear his brother referred to in so familiar and childish a way but now it seemed an ironic and painful reminder.

"Will live with me. There has been, as you know, an incident. I trust I have your utmost confidence on the matter?" She nodded distractedly, bracing herself for the worst, body physically tightening against the knowledge.

"My brother and John Watson have been exposed to an unknown agent. Physically they are sound but their memories are unreachable to them."

Tears glistened in her eyes but did not fall, a shuttering breath entered her chest, inflating her thin body.

"There was another…more profound side effect of the toxin." Mycroft continued hesitantly. He had not fully anticipated the loyalty and affection this woman seemed to bear for his brother. For a fleeting moment the factors of her age and health entered into his mind. "They have both for all intents and purposes...become similar in approximation to possessing three years as a human child."

The silence hung between them and for a moment there was nothing. A slow deliberate blink was the only reaction he received.

"Come again?"

"They have become similar in approx-"

The woman held her hand up in a show of dismay and pause, a frown creasing her face, her lips animating but betraying no particular emotion.

"Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are…three?"

Mycroft nodded. Pleased that the information was finally understood.

"May I-?"

Mycroft stood and wordlessly showed the way down the hall. If one listened very carefully the sounds behind the wall were of whispers and subdued laughter.

When they opened the door the room within was unrecognizable from its former state. A fort had been erected in place of the bed. The furniture had either been discarded and shoved against the walls or put to use as supports and barricades. The structure stood inexplicably as tall as Mycroft but the tunnel inside of it was small and twisted, low to the ground and suitable for only the body of a child. Mycroft knew without looking that the two boys would predominantly inhabit the far corner, safe and cocooned in the world of their own making. A million layers between them and everything else.

Curious eyes peered out at them from the folds of blankets deep within the structure, safe in their watchtower. Eyes locked and held, gazes unwavering and yet not a word was uttered, not a greeting or a condemnation. They were not children playing a game, they did not yell of opposing armies or try to rally the newcomers into their service. They were two sentinels hiding deep within their castle studying for the first time a woman who may or may not spark a hint of memory within their effected minds.

Mrs. Hudson said nothing, she made no excuses as she left the room only to come back with a bright orange blanket tucked into her arms. She bent carefully, her dress folding beneath her as she lowered herself to the floor. She settled the blanket onto her lap, carefully touching the edges, smoothing the cloth as she let herself be examined.

There was a shift within the fort and a small hand pulled the edge of a blanket away from the impromptu doorway, blue eyes finally taking in what she had done in her short absence.

A small gasp of surprise broke the silence of the fort, and an even more surprised child seemed to find himself in the opening, reaching out for the familiar blanket, body and subconscious racing past the conscious mind.

He was still dressed in his too large pajamas, the legs cuffed and trailing over his feet, dark curls mussed and hanging in his face, stark against his pale cheeks. He was reaching out before he could stop himself, hand hanging frozen in the air, silently asking to be handed the object, but unwilling to take the last step out to take it. He had eyes for neither of the adults, his gaze fixed on the blanket.

Mrs. Hudson raised the shock blanket just a few inches but it was enough. Sherlock stepped forward and grasped the material, pulling it against his chest and wrapping both arms around as if it might be taken away. For the first time since emerging he looked at the woman who had given him his treasure, whose lap the unfolded blanket still partially lay on.

Sherlock betrayed nothing of his thought process as he examined the older woman, his cherub lips pursed in such a manner that Mrs. Hudson found herself not only believing this extraordinary tale, but wondering how much of the Sherlock she knew remained in this child. Sherlock allowed himself the smallest twist of his lips, a flash of emotion as he disappeared into the fort, clutching the orange blanket tight as it trailed behind his legs.

The fierce whispers of John echoed clearly around the room, the meaning was lost to the strange new language which seemed to morph between them as smoothly as gas twisting in the air, a language evolving a thousand times faster than normal, digging them deeper into themselves.

They heard the moment John saw the blanket, the moment not only of understanding but recognition ignited in his mind. Mycroft knew better than to hope, than to imagine the two small creatures remembering more than that a particular object meant comfort or safety. But the knowledge, that loss of hope was a reminder, a stab in the heart he had so long pretended to be without.

The wisp of fabric brushing fabric and subdued whispers served as a prelude to their appearance at the entranceway. Sherlock emerged first, all black curls and blue eyes, fearless as he led John by the hand, waiting as the other boy emerged from the narrow passage.

Mycroft felt the ache in his chest lighten and seep deeper into soft tissues of his body all at once.

Sherlock had thrown the orange blanket over his companions' shoulders, the blanket like a cape or the trail of an obscene wedding dress in his wake.

In the perfect infallible logic of all three year olds the magic of a safety blanket meant that beneath its weave no harm could come to you.

Sherlock was protecting his John.

Johns wide brown eyes flicked across Mycroft and towards the new woman who sat in front of him and drew Sherlock under the blanket with him, his arm coming over his shoulders in a wave of orange.


	9. Chapter 9

It was not clear if John or Sherlock remembered their former landlady. They never muttered a sound which could be the child-speak version of her name, they did not look at her and expect the things she had once come to mean to them. They never asked for tea, never looked on her and saw in their minds eye the one decent meal they might have that week and most importantly, whether for better or worse, through memory loss or secrets, they never asked about an abandoned flat and pools of blood.

Despite the ambiguity of their memory of her it was quite clear that in their own way they trusted her with a sudden ferocity which they had only granted, in their own stinted way, Mycroft. It could have been the residue of wasted memories seeping to the unconscious part of their minds, or the years of experience she had both with children and Sherlock himself, but Mycroft found himself hoping that it was something less brilliant and calculating. He swept the thought away as ambiguous and childish but the feeling it created within him lingered.

Maybe, like true children, they simply loved the woman who had inadvertently brought them their first impromptu Christmas.

It was like being a child again, watching this familiar boy with a shock of black hair dissecting the world around him. He watched the thoughts cross his face, the ideas that lingered behind his eyes and in the span of a heartbeat clicked. Beneath the blanket which draped around them like a garish robe Sherlock clutched Johns little hand tighter. The smile on his face was blinding and sudden as he ran as quickly as his tangled legs would take him down the hallway he deduced the blanket had come from.

By the time the adults breached the doorway Sherlock had escaped the confines of the blanket and was half inside one of the boxes; his little legs dangling as he dug through the contents for a particular treasure which had inevitably caught his eye. The next box over John was pulling items off of the top of the pile, hindered by the waves of cloth which Mycroft was sure he wore still only as a concession to Sherlock's mental wellbeing. Every item in his pudgy baby hands, whether it be an upside down medical text or a worn scarf, brought a new bout of irrepressible giggles.

It was in the midst of this joyful chaos that Mycroft witnessed how much these two had chosen to trust Mrs. Hudson, the first time he understood how pivotal she may prove to be to all of them all.

Sherlock had pulled a human skull from the box with a triumphant yell, letting his body fall gracelessly to the floor, uncaring about the discomfort it may have caused because the skull itself was safe in his arms, tucked against his chest like a teddy bear. He held the thing at an arms length to study it, eyes tracing over its features as if he could read its former life in the structure of its hollowed cheeks and cranial sutures, like greeting an old friend and knowing they had lived a good life from the laugh lines etched deep around their mouth.

Mrs. Hudson settled herself carefully on the floor between the two boys, eyes filled with affection as she watched their infectious joy.

Sherlock saw the touch coming, the worn hand reaching out towards him but he did not run or shout or squirm away. He continued to examine his skull, affecting nonchalance, pretending that he did not care what the adults were doing even as every fiber of his being was focused on the woman beside him. There was a moment, almost instantaneous and obviously involuntary, in which his whole body froze as fingers tentatively touched his curls, but when the moment passed his focus returned to the skull which he now hugged against himself.

She was allowed to touch him.

In less than the span of an hour she had accomplished what no one but Mycroft had been able to do.

As the skull was placed lovingly to the side and Sherlock threw himself back into the mass of treasures Mrs. Hudson was allowed to cuff the end of his pants so that he would not trip, when he sat she was permitted to run a gentle hand through his unruly hair and remove the tangles which had formed. And through it all he had played his part so well that she had no idea the privilege she had just been granted.

Even watching this strange display and fully comprehending what it meant for his brother to have done it Mycroft nearly stopped her when she turned her eyes on John, a sharp warning on his lips. It was curiosity, the novel feeling of actually not knowing the outcome and a mix of despairing hope which froze the words in his throat.

John had just pulled a thick jumper from the box, his other treasures discarded and strewn all around his splayed legs. He was laughing softly, burying his face in the soft material which trailed over his lap when a hand stretched out to touch his golden hair.

It would be an understatement of the greatest misfortune to say that Sherlock froze when he understood what was about to happen. It was closer to the truth to say that it was as if he had suddenly turned to stone, heart and lungs thick and unfeeling, blue eyes as cold as ice.

John laughed freely as he let the jumper fall into his lap; pulling the fabric for no reason, save for the simple joy of manipulating the world around you and watching it react. If he saw that Mrs. Hudson was reaching for him he gave no indication of it in the tone of his laughter or the free, honest way in which he seemed to take the world around him.

It was split second before contact and Mycroft found his mouth open, words nearly spilling out when he saw it. There was a smile on John's face, a smile not put there by material things or fleeting thoughts. It was just a fragment of their language; the tiniest glean into their shared world.

It was the smile which meant everything to his brother.

Old and delicate fingers threaded through blond hair, taming wild unkempt tangles and John spared her the most fleeting of glances, a baby smile, but to Sherlock he gave a look which let the detective breathe again and his body fall from the posture of fierce protectiveness in a world of imminent danger.

Mrs. Hudson laughed easily as John pulled the striped jumper over his head to hang like a dress over his body.

Her hands moved to pull the cloth down around him and it was not what happened that astonished Mycroft, but what failed to happen.

Not the kind of scream which followed you into tormented dreams in the darkness of the night.

Not the desperate scrambling of legs and arms clumsy with the adrenalin of unadulterated panic.

Not a single object was shattered as it collided with flesh; there was not even the dull thump of tiny, desperate fists.

Sherlock settled to the floor with his skull held tight against his chest and a corner of a shock blanket covering his foot. John smiled again and in the silence that passed between the two boys were a hundred million things which Mycroft and Mrs. Hudson could never guess.

Sherlock let her touch his John.


	10. Chapter 10

Together, with three boxes of the most peculiar toys for three year olds, Sherlock and John turned the formal, immaculately despondent living room into a jungle of artifacts of life. Thick jumpers lay strewn like colorful islands in an ocean of books and gadgets. Two swords lay heavily on the fireplace mantel, sheaths pushing candlesticks out of the way in a half hazard way that seemed to loan life to the dull wood beneath. Sherlock bemoaned the loss of those particular toys but a deep, heavy gouge in the coffee table and few years off of Mrs. Hudson's life was more than enough reason to put up with the short lived tantrum.

John had adopted the idea of putting every article of clothing he found onto his small body. Only a few shirts had made their way into the boxes but on John Sherlock's long sleeved shirts seemed to be like super hero capes tailored for giants. A familiar scarf that still smelled of late night chases through London's streets completed the layered ensemble, encasing John's neck and obscuring part of his face.

Sherlock for his own part had adopted only a single piece of clothing, a thick cream jumper which he had pulled from deep within a box, disregarding it's more colorful counterparts in favor of this seemingly bland article. Sherlock pulled it on, his thin shoulders coming out of the neck line, and settled in beside John, the two of them slowly deconstructing and recreating Sherlock's lab equipment into more interesting shapes.

An hour longer and John seemed to be melting within the confines of his cloth prison but completely unwilling to be rid of a single item. The smell of bleach had lightly seeped into any item which had the misfortune of being in the main living space when the area was cleaned and it burned their noses and throats with the lingering exposure, and Mycroft had a suspicion that more than one of Sherlock's possessions had been exposed to experiments which, while none of them wanted to know the exact components, all of them could smell on their skin.

Without bringing up the idea of an extended and modified contract with Mrs. Hudson regarding her new theoretical position as helpful babysitter for fear of another long drawn out explanation of what she would and would not do, Mycroft let the woman's maternal instincts kick in. If he inflamed those instincts with a comment or two of his own it was only for the general well-being of the children.

Mrs. Hudson stood with more ease than she would admit if one were to inquire and plucked Sherlock from the tower he had been creating behind Mycroft to reach the swords. The boy squirmed in her arms in attempt to get back to his creation but she seemed to ignore him, waiting until he admitted defeat to settle him on her hip, the sweater pooling around his hips.

The clock chimed in a deep informative way that spoke of old-time clock makers toiling over a work bench and genius engineering. Normally Mycroft would take his perfectly formulated, low-caloric lunch break now, or in more recent times have the boys be brought bowls of porridge which they would subsequently ignore but Mrs. Hudson turned to the boy in her arms, waiting until blue eyes locked with her own.

"Are you hungry dear?"

Memories of recent lunches gone by clearly ran through his mind. "No."

"Did you have breakfast?"

He blinked, looking to John for answers but the look on his face was the same, slight curiosity with an overwhelming need not to be forced to eat something Mycroft made.

"…no?"

Her frown at Mycroft was quick and obligatory but her smile for Sherlock was more than genuine.

"You mean the two of you have not eaten all day? Well now that will not do, what would you like?"

Sherlock looked at her with mouth slightly agape. This was not something they remembered discussing before. When she turned to John the boy was ready for her, unusually shy as if he might be denied, a blush rising on his cheeks in a mixture of overheating and uncertainty.

" 'nanas?" He asked sweetly, pulling the scarf away from his mouth with his fingers so that she might see his hopeful smile.

"Alright dear." She bent and offered her free arm to John, the boy wobbled into her embrace, trapped beneath the weight and mess of his wardrobe. "Bananas it will be." She huffed laboriously as she balanced the two little boys but when Mycroft held out his hand in offer she clutched them tighter, not as a show but as an unconscious action as she replied in the negative, her hold on them becoming an almost embrace.

As adults the duo, as misanthropic and broken as they were, had inspired unparalleled loyalty. As children it seemed the world was very much in trouble if they had as much as a gaze and a smile.

The walk to the kitchen was thankfully short and the boys stayed put on their knees at the small table used by the staff, stilled by curiosity as they watched their former landlady rummage through the stock of food.

Mrs. Hudson waived off the offers of having the actual kitchen staff make lunch, delighting in the response her every action drew from the rapt children.

Of the two boys it was Johns face who lit up when liberal amounts of peanut butter was applied to his toast and whose eyes grew large and round when slices of banana finished his sandwich. His hands reached out as the plate was placed in front of him but just as his fingers brushed the sandwich he paused. Carefully he removed the scarf he wore, rubbing it against his cheek for just a second before placing it delicately on the table.

After this moment of calm sentimentality there was no stopping him. Peanut butter coated his hands and face equally and bananas slid onto the floor with a soft squelch, telling in a way which words could not how long it had been since he had had a decent meal fit for his age.

Sherlock watched John with more interest than he showed his food, looking at the creation if not with disdain then with intense disinterest. He allowed Mrs. Hudson to roll the sleeves of his jumper to the point of his elbows and tentatively took it into his hands allowing the innately messy sandwich to seep onto his fingers. A mess of squished banana and peanut butter had escaped the bread, crushed by his hard grip and stuck to his fingers. He dropped the sandwich to his plate and stuck out a pink tongue which he barely touched to his finger, his face prematurely skewed into an expression of disgust. But a look of surprise overtook his features, eyes widening as far as Johns had. In a breath three fingers were jammed sloppily into his mouth and his free hand was reaching for the abandoned sandwich.

Mrs. Hudson and Mycroft watched as Sherlock, the man who refused to waste energy on digestion, who had seemed to never let more than tea willingly pass his lips devoured two sandwiches, smearing peanut butter and mashed banana across his cheeks as he bit deeper into the sandwich.

John set down the crusts of his second sandwich and peered over at Sherlock, his face twisting into a grin as he took in the wasted wreckage of two sandwiches and the signs of enjoyment and food still lingering on his friends face. But now that the food was gone the sticky feeling of peanut butter was becoming too much, the knowledge of having food on his face, of having shown his cards so obviously, of having the evidence still written across his skin was making his heart pound in his chest.

He pushed the crusts away as if they had become suddenly dangerous, dawning comprehension rushing from deep within him, chemicals and reactions clicking in his brain, saturating his thoughts and making his little hands sweep them frantically away.

But it was too late.

John was not the first one to notice how Sherlock's breathing had sped up as the panic slowly rose within him but he was the first one to act. Their chairs had been pushed only inches apart making it easy for John to lean over into Sherlock's space, his round face serious in concentration as he reached to brush a smudge of banana from his friends face.

Blue eyes darted to John and stayed locked on brown eyes as his little chest began to heave. John wiped away the banana with his fingertips but a smudge of peanut butter from his dirty hands replaced it. John looked stricken, eyes widening, fear creeping into his eyes as his plan failed…but something was happening.

Sherlock had stopped gasping for air, a sound soft and indistinct, regulating his breathing, changing it to something not normal, but better.

Sherlock was giggling.

The sound was almost desperate at first, walking the line between hysteria and a slow slide into normalcy.

His pupils were blown wide, black engulfing all but a ring of blue as adrenalin surged through his body but as he giggled as he reached out with his own dirty hand to touch John's cheek.

In the silent language of best friends John swallowed the sound of his own thudding heart and reached out with both hands, holding Sherlock's face in his tiny fingers, smudging the food as his heart leapt into his throat. Sherlock took another deep, even breath and let it out again, his other hand reaching out to hold John as his giggles faded into silence.

By the time Mrs. Hudson had drawn a bath and returned the two boys were sitting silently in their seats, foreheads pressed together, arms around each other and eyes closed.

The world could have fallen down around them and in that moment, they would not have noticed.

The boys walked under their own power to the large bathroom. Outwardly they appeared as if nothing had happened, two young boys lagging on their way to bath time, lost in secrets and whispers. But the orange blanket which had become inseparable from the boys had made its careful way around Sherlock's shoulders and little hands which normally clasped together in glee and easy assurances were held tight as if their lives depended on the way they held each other.

Mrs. Hudson handed them two wet cloths as they sat on the edge of the bath and let them clean their, or rather, each other's faces, so as not to spoil the many layers of clothing they still wore. Lost as they were in each other the adults stepped back, no more a part of the moment than the furniture.

Mycroft stepped backwards, another step and he would be in the hallway and could slip away unnoticed. He had calls to make, old journals to uncover, memories long ago lost into the sweet darkness of oblivion to pull into the garish daylight and examine under a microscope.

He had underestimated how much the past would bleed through to the present.

He needed to call mummy, her boys needed her.

But as his foot breached the doorway a thin hand and a cold stare froze him the way world leaders dreamed of doing.

"Still not their housemaid dear, and you did not exactly give me time to reschedule my appointments for today. Just because I am an old lady does not mean I do not have things to do." She set two towels down on the counter and pulled a phone out of her pocket, looking at it for an extended moment before seeming to realize which angle to flipping it open.

"I am sure you boys will do just fine without me." She glanced at where the boys had slid to the floor, peanut butter smeared towels no longer cleaning their faces but sitting in wet heaps by their feet, a pool of toilet paper growing as they wiped the paper in heaps across their skin.

"Now Sh- a former tenant of mine gave me one of these cellular phones, always trying to text me for something, or more often than not, a certain someone." She smiled, her gaze locked so fondly on the children that Mycroft hoped she might stay. "Now feel free to call me dear."

Mycroft let the older woman take his private number and he pretended to not already have her complete contact information. She promised to return and took the credit card Mycroft gave her to buy clothing and other necessities and Mycroft found himself alone with two pairs of eyes gazing up at him.

For the entirety of their stay with him Mycroft had allowed the children to wash themselves, giving them the tools but had slacked somewhat in the supervision. He knew it would eventually devolve to the point where a full on bath would become repugnantly necessary but he had always imagined the endeavor as somehow different. Fleetingly he thought of changing from his formal suit and into a pair of swim trunks in preparation but he found himself unwilling to leave his brother alone after such a traumatic episode, as well as he seemed to be coping with the half felt memories now there was no telling what could swim to the surface of his genius mind and in what manner it would formulate.

Not to mention it would be the singular most terrible moment of his adult life to have a three year old version of his brother best him with a remark regarding his weight while half naked.

Despite appearances and the best effort of the three year old Sherlock was still agitated so it was him who Mycroft pulled closer as he sunk to sit on the edge of the bath, pulling the familiar jumper over his head as John started to do the same for himself. Mycroft let Sherlock finish removing his clothing in the unabashed way of very small children. He had imagined that he would find it awkward to see his brother, so independent and cold, so vulnerable and literally naked, but as soft baby skin was revealed and little legs clambered into the tub with a splash the thought evaporated and corrected itself.

Sherlock, this Sherlock, no longer had the independence or ability to care for himself, it was not yet deeply rooted into his mind that he had to be alone and stolid to survive.

This Sherlock was not alone.

John was being slightly shy, slowing as he got to the layers of clothing which would reveal his skin. A problem which could, for now, be easy fixed. Mycroft added a mixture of soaps to the water and turned the tap until bubbled formed all around Sherlock who was now leaning out of the water to see what was taking John. Stricken brown eyes fleetingly met Mycroft's.

Mentally he added another name to the list of people to be immediately contacted.

His background check had not revealed this.

With obvious intent and a promise to be back before they could drown themselves Mycroft gathered the lump of jumpers and discarded shirts and left the room at a brisk pace. The clothes were easy enough to be rid of, dropped into the boxes from which they came but he lingered outside the open door to the bathroom. He still had thirty seconds before John was likely to be in the bath and forty until any long term damage could be done from oxygen deprivation.

He clicked on John's phone, lifted from a bloodied jacket nearly a week before to find the appropriate number. Twenty three missed texts flashed onto the screen in various states of annoyance and sobriety, the final message lingered on the screen.

'You stood me up. Again. Do not bother making excuses. This boyfriend better be worth it.'

He tucked the phone away and entered the bathroom to find two sopping boys immersed in bubbles, hair slack and bubbles clinging to the ringlets. There was nothing playful about their demeanor as they gazed up at him, something had passed between them. Time he had been assumed would be wasted in idle chatter had left him adrift in a sea of their creation.

There was nothing for Mycroft to do but wait and let them guide him to his new place in their world.

They did not squirm as Mycroft poured water over their heads, they did not try to splash him or struggle as soap threatened to fall into their eyes.

They watched quietly as the bubbled died around them, their bodies malleable and mouths silent.

Mycroft was beginning to think that he had committed an indiscretion and that they were boycotting speaking with him but he saw Johns hand reach out above the level of the water and touch Sherlock's bare shoulder in what an adult would call reassurance and a child would have no name for.

Mycroft let his hands fall, they were generally clean and free of soap, if they were going to alter the way their lives had been leading with some grand secret it best be done while they were not blinking up at him through rivulets of water.

"Why?" Sherlock's voice was crisp and resonated through the small chamber like the ringing of bells, as clear and sweet. He was not angry or demanding or sad, his voice held no definable emotion one would attach to a child but was familiar in a way no parent would want to imagine. It was the voice of a child asking why mommy would never come home, a toddler watching the chemotherapy drip and wondering why its parents would not help them, a child knowing that the blows would come but never understanding what they had done wrong.

He sat up straight in the water, bubbles absurdly making him seem so much younger than his already shortened years as clear dry eyes gazed unblinkingly into Mycroft.

"Why are you taking care of us?" He bit his bottom lip, reddening it as he waited, debating the next careful words. "Why do you…bother?"

Without memory. Without the thousands of harsh words. Without nights filled with silent tears and days filled with fear. Mycroft could see every one of Sherlock's scars written in his eyes.

He could see his own failures etched into the soul of a child.

He reached into the bath, mindless of his suit, and pulled Sherlock from the water, swathing him in a towel and reaching out, cloth in hand to envelop the suddenly shy John. He pulled them into his arms, letting their wet hair soak his shirt as they craned their necks to look at him, warm and safe in the circle of his arms and the comfort of his lap.

"Because we are family, the three of us." He looked both little boys in the eyes, needing to convey how much these words meant. Warm understanding and wordless relief looked back at him and he could not stop the soft, almost paternal smile which stole across his face.

"We will be bothering each other for the rest of our lives."


	11. Chapter 11

A few miniature crisis's cropped up throughout the rest of the day, North Korea was making something of a nuisance of itself, but nothing that drew him away from his little charges for more than a few minutes. After their conversation things seemed to get a little easier.

They were more comfortable with him.

Less afraid that he would disappear.

Things would have to change. Their lives would be anything but stagnant in the upcoming weeks, already appointments had been set and pushed up, but now, in this moment, everything was alright.

Mycroft found that he could manage his usual amount of work while watching over his new charges. They were quiet when the mood struck them, always speaking in coded whispers and giggling in subdued laughter as if the sound of a full voice and true laughter might break them apart. But cohabitation, even in the same room, was easy. Their behavioral pattern was easy to distinguish and anticipate. Too much silence inevitably means that they are up to something, whether it is a tower to reach a glittering object or the rewiring of a lamp to make it 'better'. The sound of only one boy, whether it was a few stinted lonely words or a soliloquy in a quick flighty voice like the wings of a hummingbird, meant that impressions and memories were bubbling into their conscious minds and frightening them.

Breaks were no longer spent alone contemplating his brother's affairs or lamenting his current diet, they were spent in two-minute affairs when one boy or the other tugged at his trouser leg and in a bright chiming voice they described a new finding, some elaborate piecemeal tale before wandering back to their playmate, their family.

Dinner was a quick effortless affair, Sherlock taking small reserved bites as John kept up a continuous litany, turning moments which could hold great terror into bit back laughter.

It was nearly eight thirty and eyelids had begun to droop, and yawns had begun to interrupt rambling sentences when Mycroft heard the chime of his personal phone. A text.

'Still not their housekeeper, putting off taking down the fort will not make me do it dear.'

Mycroft blinked, read the message again, and laughed.

It was an unusual occurrence when people surprised him but this time he did not mind.

Mycroft bid the two boys goodnight at the entranceway to their fort, letting them crawl into its warm depths to sleep if just for one night.

If this was how they felt safe so be it. They would all need rest for what faced them tomorrow.

 

The ride was silent, the air surrounding them so filled with tension that it seemed somehow more substantial, as if air could weigh heavy in their chests, breaths weighed down by too much silence. Small overnight bags had been packed, essential items dragged into the front of the car with them, a bag of half crushed cookies used to bribe them into compliance and an orange blanket fell together in a tangle between the two children's chairs.

Unspoken words hung between them, tentative and fragile new trust kept them in their seats more than the forgotten cookies which crumbled between them. Any other children, less brilliant, less observant, less wounded, would not have understood, would not have even perceived.

The unrest and unfamiliar sickening twist of simply not knowing grew and changed within Mycroft.

It was no longer just the immediate future which had his genius mind in turmoil; it was the impossibility of the future which lay out before them.

They read in his face his uncertainty and a nameless word kin to fear, they heard in his voice things which he would never utter to their ears.

Despite his smile, his deadpan face which protected the secrets of countless nations, these two children had sensed his apprehension.

The combination of the two thoughts, of their continued trust in him despite their ability to see through his mask should have brought warmth, a feeling perhaps, of success.

A wave of sudden yet fleeting nausea burned through him as he turned his face to the window to hide the worst if it from them. The car lurched through a ditch as they wandered further from the main haunts of society and a cookie fell to the floor with a soft abandoned crunch. When Mycroft looked back at his companions two sets of eyes stared at him while betraying nothing of their own thoughts, small hands clutching over plastic and restraints to hold onto one another, fingers speaking of reassurance and fierce protection.

It would seem that undertaking the care of these two helpless innocents would be the most efficient diet plan he had ever had.

Unrest filled each of them like a contagion, each person passing it onto the next. But the little boys did not protest as they were removed from the theoretical safety of the car. Mycroft's heart nearly skipped a beat when he climbed out to find a small hand being offered to him.

Sherlock and John stood as they normally did, hands clutched tight between them, but huge brown eyes had focused on him, John's tiny hand being held out for him to take. Sherlock let out an audible breath of relief When Mycroft held the proffered hand, engulfing it in his own, holding John protected between them.

He had told the boys the precious little with which he dared. He had promised that he would protect them and that the people he chose for them to meet would not hurt them. He warned them that memories from before 'the accident' may come to them, that they might remember a face or a voice.

Mycroft hoped in the darkest part of his heart that they would not.

The light was not worth the darkness.

They knocked on the door but it was unnecessary, cameras had followed their slow ascent up the path, old eyes doubtless stealing a first glance at new bodies. It was a member of staff who opened the door and led them into a living room much like his own, aesthetically beautiful and wholly untouched.

None of them made a move to sit.

John held his hand tighter and Mycroft wondered if it was a reaction to the way Sherlock was holding him.

These were not the rooms in which they spent their adolescent years, nothing to trigger a memory or rouse the breath of a feeling. No ghosts hid in the dark corners of these rooms. The house of their childhood lay buried in memory, it could have burned to the ground, its rooms turned to dust, and its hallways barren save for the lives of spiders for all the years it had been abandoned. None of the furnishings were reminiscent of those long gone years; these rooms were the same as his own only a handful of days ago, perfectly impersonal.

Mycroft wished that he held both boys hands in his own.

The moment she walked into the room every eye fell on her. She was handsome, the kind of woman you hesitate to call beautiful because of a strength of character seemingly intrinsic within her physically. There was a hitch in her step, a moment so quick and small it would have been lost to the blinking of an eye, but it was there the moment she laid eyes on his charges.

Mycroft looked into blue eyes as familiar as his own.

"Hello Mummy."

She nodded her welcome, her acknowledgement to Mycroft, but her eyes were on Sherlock. There were a million repressed questions waiting on her lips, questions she was not sure anyone would want to the answers to.

Impossible to wish your child would remember nothing.

To forget you.

To forget everything and start anew.

Like nothing had ever happened.

Like you never happened.

In the span of a breath she collected herself, her lips smiling, her long delicate hands reaching out as she knelt on the floor as if she might touch the black unruly curls but hesitating, hands falling to her side, fingers empty and curling around nothing.

In Mycroft's hand John fidgets, holding him a little tighter, the soft whining sound is both distressed and disarming. Blue eyes and a face too much like Sherlock's turns to the small blond boy, softening as John takes a shuffling step closer to Sherlock, pressing their shoulders together, hiding their hands between them. Protection and comfort in the uncompromised innocents of his touch.

"What handsome boys you are." Her voice had been meant to sound welcoming and reassuring, perhaps a little hard, something authoritative and adult and sure. She never meant it to come out as a strangled, choking, breath. She cleared her throat as if the problem was purely physical and smiled harder.

"I have been working on some samples Mycroft gave me." She seemed to relax into the thought, into something tangible and real and quantitative. Her eyes lit up. Where there was once trepidation existed the spark of assurance that comes with unadulterated fact, knowledge so pure that you can exist within it. Her lithe body, so coiled and tense before, seemed to ease ever so slightly, like the falling of heavy armor, as she prepared to give them her results.

"All of Mycroft's tests, all of his scientists were right. They missed nothing." She smiled the way another mother might when bestowing a wrapped present on their child, knowing that this gift would mean the world to them, that this would be the toy which would follow them into adulthood. The well-loved teddy bear, the scrap of faded blanket. Her hand rose again, not reaching, not stretching to touch, but offering, long white fingers beautiful and delicate. "It is as if the accident never happened at all." Her smile curled as emotion overrode the falseness, her slate grey hair falling into her face, framing her high cheeks, true happiness glistening in her grey eyes. "You are perfect."

Fingers stretched. Reached.

Sherlock took a step back, his face dark, curls hanging into his brilliant eyes, waiting in silence until John stepped back with him, his little hand still stretched out to hold Mycroft's, their bodies falling into the cast of Mycroft's shadow.

She did not notice the way his breathing had grown shallow and fast, or the way his eyes darkened and pupils became pinpoints in an ocean of hard blue. She did not recognize the signs of fear building in her own child. She could not touch him to feel the clamminess of his skin.

"Not accident." Sherlock looked into his mothers eyes. He did not recognize the nuances of her face or the tenor of her voice. He looked as her the way he had once looked at suspects, as if he could see past the physical and into her very soul, as if he could take her most jealously guarded secrets and bear them into unforgiving light.

He shook his head as the word rose to his lips unbidden. A word which echoed from the destroyed memories of the past and infused itself into his new life in blood and tears.

"Attack."


	12. Chapter 12

Everyone was silent.

Mycroft watched the joy fall from his mothers face, watched as all of the unspeakable questions answered themselves piteously. He watched as her blue-grey eyes widened and Sherlock retreated further into John, his words echoing if not in reality then in their minds.

Mycroft wished he had devoted himself more fully to the application of advanced sciences. That he might be able to put himself in two places at once. To protect his mother, to maintain that same respectful distance, that cold affection, to reassure her that if Sherlock knew…

But there was only one of himself, one moment to chose, one action to take.

Mycroft bent and took the boys into his arms, crushing them to him and to each other. He could feel the cold tangles of distorted memory emerging in Sherlock, the way his blue gaze had blown wide, mind lost in thought, trying to grasp onto feelings which fled like dreams obliterated in the cutting light of day.

It was a room, just a room. He had the blueprints to the house of course, knew that this room was far from the laboratories hidden in corridors and false bookcases. Knew that they would be safe here. Knew their mother well enough that he opened the door and found two beds laid with children's covers, found books with bright colors which shone from the bookcases and toys that littered the floor like an offering and a sacrifice.

He set them down on one of the beds, the bedspread almost garishly childish, its vivid spots of contrasting colors making the two dark children set upon seem darker. Like child soldiers brought back into the fold of society, minds and memories ill made for the bodies of babes.

They never spoke to him when they were like this. In moments like this they existed only for each other. Desperate hands and fumbling words, curls and baby hands and silent meaningful gazes. Mycroft stepped back to give them the privacy they so often craved, ready to be their silent sentry yet again. But something gripped his sleeve and held him back, held him close.

His hand seemed very, very small as it curled tight, little fingers straining and stark white against the smooth dark material of his suit.

Blue eyes looked up at him through the fog of memories and unsettled thought.

"Not safe."

 

"She will not hurt you." The words were meant to sooth.

Sherlock shook his head, upset that he was not being understood. Eyes pleading for recognition, for a thought, a reassurance, that was so much more than pedestrian.

"Not safe."

The boys were asleep, curled together so close that they might have been a single child lying in the otherwise pristine bed. Mycroft had helped them undress; watching as John whispered and touched. The pure innocents of the man amplified in the child, his undiminished heart unreserved and unafraid to reach out and cup Sherlock's face in his little hand.

The last thing Mycroft saw as he spread the orange safety blanket over them was the look on his own brother's face. Their arms had pulled and grabbed and crushed in the manner of those with limbs too small for their desires, baby hands grasping at hair, fingers laying flat over a pale chest and a rapidly beating heart, as if John could will it to slow. Sherlock looked as he had never had as a child.

Without a brave false smile, without an edge of brittle resolve, with John holding vigil over his heart, he looked as if he believed there was something good left in the world.

Mycroft lingered, listening to the rapid sound of Sherlock's breathe as it grew deep and even. He wanted to understand the words they were whispering to one another, to begin to fathom what goes on in their minds. He wanted to be trusted enough to be told.

But the meaning was lost to the night, to the muffle of the blankets around them and secreted away in their private tongue. His listened to the high sweet voice of Sherlock rise and mingle with Johns comforting tumble of words. He listened until the only sound left in the room was the comforting drifting breath of his two wards lost to sleep.

She was not in the untouched living room in which they had been greeted, but Mycroft did not pause or take a misstep, he passed the room by with hardly a glance, delving further into the abyss of rooms until he reached what appeared to be a linen closet and disappeared into it and the antiseptic hallway beyond.

He nodded to the security camera on the off chance that she was actually watching, but unlike himself his family had never taken the things, they were only here for his comfort. He harbored no delusions that she had actually accepted them as a national mandate in conjunction with several of her projects; he seriously doubted all notes sent to classified heads of state were concluded with a heart following her name like the addition of an extra doctorate.

The hallways were clear; he passed by the first few darkened labs with the reassuring whir of refrigeration equipment and projects carrying on without need of a human eye or mind. It was the last lab and obviously the most favored from which the light shone over the scuffmarks in the hallway.

She did not look up from her work as he entered the room but gestured vaguely with her hand at the chair opposite her. He felt a stab of familiarity cut through his chest and steal his breath; it was a passing fancy, nothing but the trick of the eye, but for the span of a heartbeat he could see Sherlock restored, lips pressed in a line, waving him off, entrapped in a mystery all his own.

"This is good." She said without looking up. Mycroft graciously settled into the uncomfortable lab chair across from her and waited. The papers in her hand were no more than a few days old but the creases on them spoke of being held in small hands for long hours. "The implications this has for the rest of his life, for the rest of both of their lives-"

She interrupted herself, letting the papers fall between them, words read so many times that they no longer held true meaning. Her eyes appeared older under the sterile glare of the florescent lights, a deep piercing grey with a subtle feeling of despair that had nothing their surroundings.

"I never met John Watson." There was small sad smile on her lips as she met her oldest son's eyes. "He is good to Sherlock isn't he?"

She asked not as if it was a question that needed answering but one that she thought would sound beautiful to be answered.

Mycroft thought carefully before he responded, the words not coming easily when he thought about the two men he had known and the children they had become. "He is not more than Sherlock deserves- but he is more than I ever hoped for." Mycroft reached out and straightened the papers, wishing for his umbrella, for a purpose for his hands. The pile was neat, perfectly straight, and he had no choice but to pull them back into his lap and look his mother in the eyes.

"John Watson is the most decent man I have ever met."

Her smile did not change but it seemed to grow, to at last reach her eyes. If she were anyone else in the world he would have determined if she was thinking about the way the little blond boy had reached out to protect her son. He would have ascertained how much of her mind was enveloped in the past and how much hope was set for the future, he would have established her every move for at least the next week and more likely, the next year. But she was his mother, and so when she laid her hand on top of his he thought of nothing but what she gave to him.

"We will not dissuade him from what he links with me." Her voice was calm and resolute, her hand did not shake and her pulse was even, and Mycroft dreamt of martyrs. "He needs to learn to trust his instincts. He has a lifetimes worth of lessons guiding him-" Her smile was warm as her eyes were serious. "Without a lifetime of pain to pay for it."


	13. Chapter 13

They debated for hours, pulling up case studies of nearly inapplicably dissimilar animals, invoking old memories and informing one another of recent developments and in the end Mycroft did what he had known was inevitable from the start. He caved to blue eyes and ultimately did what he knew would be best for the two boys who still slept blissfully unaware of the debates underway about their future.

Mycroft would never tell Sherlock about his mother, he would never try to persuade him that he was safe in her care. But that did not mean that he would cave to her excessive martyrdom and break her heart and ruin his own resources for the future.

He was there when John blinkingly opened his eyes to the new day and caught the first blinding baby smile of the morning. John always seemed to wake in this manner, as if each and every single new day had the potential to be the best of his life. Each morning washed away the sins and the torments of the night.

He was spared another purposeful smile, a parting glance, before the little boy turned to his attention to his bedmate and tapped a finger to his friends nose with a half swallowed giggle.

Sherlock did not blink sleepily into wakefulness as John had, some modicum of the previous day staying with him as his blue eyes opened forcefully. John laughed easily and sweetly as Sherlock took in the bright orange of the blanket still covering their bodies, as his hands flew forward even though his entire field of vision was nothing but Johns smiling face and the lingering knowledge of Mycroft being close at hand perforated his mind.

They watched the knowledge sink in and registered on his cherubic features, brilliant mind whirring. His eyelashes fluttered and with a sigh he shut his eyes and turned his face back into the pillow, curls cascading messily around him, hand clutching unconsciously on the blanket covering John.

The little blond was apparently used to this behavior, it was as natural to him as smiling to catch Sherlock’s face in his hands and press a wet kiss to his lips. Mycroft was torn between laughter and horror when intense blue eyes opened and observed the world again through a slit of dark lashes.

When Sherlock sat up and let the orange blanket trail over his head, his legs tangled with Johns and a small pleased smile on his face, Mycroft knew exactly what he was going to do.

 

Mycroft never broke his word. He would do nothing to dissuade Sherlock of his beliefs, but he would reinforce the more fleeting beliefs of children, he would put merit behind the ideas which in his previous life, Sherlock never had the liberty to believe. John would help him do it.

He asked Sherlock, still sleep warmed and tangled with John what the woman of the previous day meant for them. His face hardened, the slight smile on his face left from John becoming brittle as if it might shatter. His words were intense and cold and left no room for ambiguity or argument. Mycroft recognized this look. Sherlock had cultivated it very early in their childhood, strange to have seen it grow and change and become part of the man and fall back to the child. It was a look of longsuffering, one that made the receiver feel as if somehow they had become a very slow child and it was all their fault.

‘Not safe.’

Mycroft nodded solemnly. He kept a look of fierce concentration on his face as he carefully extracted the two boys from the tangle of bedding and wrapped them together in the shock blanket.

“There.” Mycroft nodded as he held them in his lap, his arms holding them just a little too tight, letting them feel his weight against their little bodies. “Now, are you safe?”

Sherlock opened his mouth to reply sharply, his brow creasing as if the words were so bitter that they twisted his face, but they never came. His mouth hung silent and open, a million thoughts, a million little deductions flashing through his mind.

The blanket.

Mycroft holding him close.

The woman.

The unbridled foreboding twisting in his stomach and crawling up his throat.

The terror of memories like nightmares he could not qualify.

But it came down to John. It always came down to John.

John who meant ‘safe’.

John who had killed to save him.

John who would have sacrificed himself to save Sherlock.

John who was holding his hand.

John who would follow him, whatever he chose.

Slowly, as if unsure how it had happened, Sherlock nodded.

 

Mycroft did not push his slim advantage. He held them close and let them watch the closed door, the ex soldier and the consulting detective notably more at ease when they could see the single entry point of the room.

They would not, as originally planned, spend a few more days here. No matter what he needed or desired, his children needed to go home more.

He had hoped that between his mother and himself and their intimate knowledge of the man and the child both they could devise a plan to raise him. To do more than avoid the mistakes of the past.

He had hoped that with her he could make Sherlock happy.

In his lap John was talking again, soft burbles and sounds accompanied by a face with a little pink tongue poking out of his mouth. Together the boys looked up at his face and burst into a peel of laughter, lost in their own joke at his expense.

Guilt is a strange sensation, an emotion so complicated that it exists only in humans, an emotion which exists in levels and hides in thoughts and memories. It slides in and out of consciousness and takes you by surprise, you can live your life with the best of intentions and wake one day to find yourself destroyed for what you have done.

Guilt was never an emotion Mycroft felt when working. Of course people died and suffered, but it all had a meaning, a perfectly calculated dance. If not him then someone with less elegance and more cruelty could step in his place. To destroy was, in a way, to save.

But it was what he felt every moment he laid eyes on his baby brother. It was why he watched and plotted and refused to be put off. Guilt was the reason he first met John Watson in an empty car park.

Now it ebbed and flowed in his heart, a strange and painful sensation for one who never had found use for paltry human emotions. For one who could have happily lived and died without feeling anything more poignant than slight annoyance.

It was euphoria, the relief of a failed lifetime to see Sherlock so altered, to see him smile just to be near John. To know that this time would be different, a second chance that no one had before been granted. Relief that he could give Sherlock the brother he deserved.

And guilt so sharp and cold that it could cut into his heart before he ever knew it existed, like a knife so sharp and perfect that you could only know you were doomed when blood splashes to the floor with a sound like summer rain. Guilt that he had not been that brother.

 

Mummy would agree to only one further meeting, and at that only to bid them farewell. She did not need to say the words for Mycroft to know them, they hung between them like the haze of a sickroom and the clammy hopeless blankets of a deathbed.

One last goodbye to her youngest child.

It was done in the crisp air of the long driveway, the gray area between worlds, neither her strange and looming home nor the safety of the car which waited for them short feet away.

Mycroft had been willing to carry his wards out but they refused his offer, sliding off the bed and clutching the blanket around them just a little too fiercely for the calm they so obviously wished to portray. They stood now as they had when they entered the home only a day ago. Hands clasped in a line, John stretching his little hand up to clutch at Mycroft, his other perfectly at ease in Sherlock’s.

She did not move to touch them, she hardly looked as if she wanted to speak, wanting the moment to end and last for eternity, just to stand and look at him forever a moment longer. At long last she nodded, a fleeting smile on her mouth.

Impossible to imagine being forgotten by your own child.

Impossible to hope with everything that you are that you will never be remembered.

Guilt so thick and real that it is in the air you breathe, that it infuses every cell of your body until you are sick with it.

A step back, the soft tread of her stained lab shoes, back to work, back to find not a cure but to make sure one is never produced.

“Wait.”

She was on the verge of turning away when Sherlock’s voice broke the silence, clear and sharp and sudden.

He dropped Johns hand and the blanket tumbled off his shoulders as he stepped forward. Mycroft could feel Johns hand begin to slide from his own but Sherlock looked back him, not saying a word, not needing to as John settled in beside him again, hand clutching just a little tighter.

He ran the few feet which separated them and every eye was on him, each of them watching with a new appreciation of how very small he was now, of how his every feature seemed to betray a delicacy which disconnected from his character. His raven hair curled again his too pale skin, bobbing and flooding into his eyes and resting on delicate cheek bones, thick black lashes were stark against white skin and surrounding azure eyes which seemed to burn.

He stopped at her feet, looking up at her not without fear but with a bravery that outshone it, looking up at a mother he did not know he had.

His hand was tentative, slow as he reached out, fingertips barely brushing the back of her hand, small fingers resting against the back of her own.

Sherlock would never know the full impact of his words.

He would never know what it meant to her.

To him it had become something simple and clear, unburdened by memories and pain it was just a thought.

An instinct.

“Not your fault.”


	14. Chapter 14

A phone call and a handful of text messages later Mycroft was assured that while his plans were in effect and in fact ahead of schedule, they would not be completed until later in the day. The two boys beside him were taking advantage of his distraction, the stale remains of a cookie they discovered lodged in the seat was being tossed back and forth with ill aimed throws, bits of cookie crumbling and breaking into the air with every toss.

John looked at him as his phone clicked off, his face covered in a dusting of cookie crumbs and smudged with particles of chocolate and positively beamed at him.

They could not be could not be allowed to return home preemptively and destroy his meticulously laid plans.

It was with a sense of surrender that he directed the driver to whatever shopping centers people used these days when they could not simply delegate the task. His phone vibrated and the small screen seemed like a comforting window to a world he had almost forgotten. Words like ‘urgent’ and ‘impending’ were easily corrected with a few careful words, a linked document and slightly more than a subtle intellectual nudge. It only took a moment but he had become immersed in it, Korea really was making something of a nuisance of itself. His phone buzzed again, the world at his fingertips, and at that exact moment the shattered and hopeless remains of a cookie smacked him in the face.

It was to the sound of two children laughing that a look of if not happy, then contented concentration, was replaced by a irrepressible smirk which stole onto Mycroft’s face against his will as he wondered for the umpteenth time what his life had become.

 

Children should not live in such perpetual chaos as this, not these children already predisposed to dark tendencies and hard painful lives. Children need structure; they need rules and a place to call home in which they feel safe and loved, they require a core group of adults they can trust to take care of them, some modicum of normalcy to which they can latch onto when all else fails and their dark worlds seems all too much.

They need him to pull his act together and stop acting as if somehow his brother will return to him if he delays just a little longer.

They need him to stop hoping that anyone will come out of this unchanged.

And he will.

Normalcy.

A proper home.

A proper life.

He can make things go right this time.

Tomorrow.

Today will be the last day of glittering strangeness as they prepare for a life they had already lived.

 

It took the greater part of the day to secure what several somewhat reliable sources had declared absolutely necessary for the proper development of two growing boys. The design of both the structure of the buildings and the interior set up were woefully inefficient and somewhat counterintuitive. Every aisle of every shop seemed to be fraught with hiding places for tiny bodies and riddled with abrupt turns behind which any enemy could be lingering in wait.

The aisles positively gleamed with objects which called out to be torn from their packages to any three year old mind. The most innocuous of these objects suddenly seemed a looming threat. Childishly scrawled block letters informed him of toys which could be a choking hazard, as if some frightful child would tear the pieces of his new toy apart and promptly shove them into every available orifice. Other gleaming toys informed him in garish colors that they would be too advanced for his young wards.

Mothers and fathers and children milled about in a mindless chaotic stream, each adding a new level of awareness as they wandered closer to his bright eyed companions who seemed less inclined to stay with him with every passing moment.

If he was ever to have the concentration to make a single necessary purchase he would have to eliminate several of the most dire threats to his wards. It was only for their own safety that he hastily plucked his two boys from the screaming masses of leashed and diseased children and dropped them into the metal bed of their carriage.

Sherlock and John stood barely restrained in their gilded prison, pointing at one object or another, leaning out with tiny fists to latch onto a prize and pull it crashing towards them. Despite Mycroft’s fears they made no move to escape, contented by the little bursts of speed during which they cried out gleefully.

They started their journey in the store using what Mycroft would describe as mostly English, a communication unique onto themselves but decipherable by the general public or, at very least, a determined translator. But as more and more children flitted past their metal bars Sherlock drew away from the sides of the cart, speaking in softer progressively indecipherable tones. The way his wards looked at the other children, bodies held unnaturally still and eyes wide open, it was as if they were trying to see something more than little bodies and short years. It was as if they were trying to determine if they were the same type of creature as themselves at all.

Mycroft swiftly ignored warnings that promised the selected educational toys would be too advanced and tossed them into the growing pile within the carriage. Along with a selection of multimedia tools and basic ‘necessary’ items Mycroft observed where the boys eyes lingered, he watched their faces change even as they stayed uncharacteristically well behaved and silent, sitting at last back to back in the center of their carriage as this world threatened to overwhelm them.

For Sherlock a more intimate toy selection was embarrassingly easy. His eyes locked and grew wide, his red mouth opening not to scream or beg, but torn between the words and the unconscious need.

When Mycroft placed the amateur detective kit with its lustrous plastic magnifying glass in Sherlock’s lap the tendrils of cold misgiving creeping up his spine melted. His hand reverently touched the glass as if it were beautiful and rare, the frantic tension in his face and shoulders soothed and disappeared.

John was slightly more difficult to read. Every individual box and toy and child seemed to catch his attention, more often than not making his brown eyes grown wide in wonder. In the end it was more for Mycroft than John when he plucked the small teddy bear from the shelf and placed it carefully in Johns arms.

There was a moment, holding it in his hands and staring into its button eyes, that felt as if John had peered past the fabric and stuffing and found inside, a soul. He smiled as he pulled the thing to his chest protectively, closing it in his crossed arms so that now the action of a self hug so often found in his small countenance was less of a heartache than in itself an embrace.

The second store, while slightly more attuned to miniature costumers, seemed intent on complicating the lives of every adult with the misfortune of entering. Sherlock and John refused to be placed inside the safety of the metal basket, there was after all a ‘race car’ attached to the front of the carriage.

Mycroft thought the idea of settling his two three year old charges in an easily escapable red plastic vaguely car shaped transport was an ill conceived plan and had opened his mouth to tell them exactly that. But the words died in his throat when it was Sherlock who ran for the toy, opening the little door and waiting only to see if John had followed to place himself inside.

Mycroft followed in the wake of his brother, calmly stranding over the chosen cart. Blue eyes looked up at him without a shadow of the pain he had imagined would always linger there, every misdeed forgotten in the unflappable enthusiasm of childhood.

He looked happy.

Sherlock pushed over on the red plastic bench seat to make room as John piled inside, a tumble of little legs and uncoordinated arms as the wheels of the carriage let them roll slightly away. The two boys wriggled, settling themselves in. John pressed a kiss to his new teddy bear and wedged it onto the seat between their two bodies. Sherlock’s almost gleeful expression hardened, his glare fixed on the small stuffed toy, plots for its destruction whirling in his mind when Johns hands curled over his on the bright plastic of their false steering wheel. An adoring smile from John and the look of destruction reluctantly faded from Sherlock’s face. Mycroft sighed and took his place at the back of the cart as the two boys erratically turned the wheel, dodging obstacles he was too old to see.

He did not need to put them in a cage to keep them close. They would keep each other close.

The sales women fawned over his ‘sons’, charmed by Sherlock’s wide purposeful gaze and Johns uninhibited smile. Although their attention was unwanted their preoccupations with his wards was not without merit.

Despite their somewhat precarious relationship in the past Mycroft bore no ill will towards his brother and certainly not to the man who had defied logic and reason and implanted himself firmly into Sherlock’s closed world. It was an act of morality and goodwill that Mycroft passed by the racks of brightly colored clothes emblazoned with various embarrassing slogans and garish poorly drawn television characters. If he paused only a moment too long at the shirt which announced proudly in its pink bubble script ‘Princess’ it was nothing but a hiccup in his otherwise morally sound mind.

With the aid of far too many assistants, who had been twirled around the fingers of his smiling wards, Mycroft was able to attain a reasonable wardrobe for the boys. It was hours before the bulk of the shopping was done and they were satisfied that the trip would not have to be repeated. Mycroft was on his way to the checkout when a particularly bright laugh cut through the din of screaming children and mindless music.

It was, of course, only because John had found the clothing so particular that he placed two sets into the carriage basin.

In line a thought came to him as he was gazing down at his final impulse purchase. It only took the effort of a text to his assistant to procure a camera for his personal use. John laughed again as he placed the matching sets of footie pajamas onto the checkout counter.

 

His plans, which had been placed under the supervision of Mrs. Hudson for the duration of their absence, had been completed. Under normal circumstances there would be no emotions attached to the revealing of a gift. Gifts were chosen rarely and only then on a scale of usefulness to the recipient. There was no emotion invested in a new microscope, no heart in a particularly virulent strain of virus or a full work up on the newest poisons in the underworld. Each gift practical, useful, with no chance of failure or dislike. But now there was a lingering misgiving present in his heart. The recipients of his gifts could not be fully anticipated and this was not a piece of machinery or a virus. This was not a matter of pure intellect or strict need.

Mycroft never put any emotion into his gifts.

He had never hoped so dearly that someone would enjoy a gift of his creation.

They knew something was amiss, it must have been in his gait, or the way he could not stop his eyes from wandering to them as they entered their rooms but John was clutching his hand a little tighter and Sherlock had a look on his face of perfect omnipotent knowledge which would follow him into adulthood.

Mrs. Hudson greeted them with a smile at the door of the room which had once housed their mammoth fort, a smile of pride for herself and one of genuine warmth for the two boys at his side. When she twisted the handle and pushed the door open none of them were surprised, but then again, Mycroft reminded himself, neither is a child come Christmas morning.

They loved it instantly. The colors, the bed pushed tight and secure against a wall and large enough to hold both of their small bodies, the oversized chair meant to engulf, the toys glistening on their shelves for no one but themselves.

Normal.

Safe.

The room which Mycroft hoped could become their home.


	15. Chapter 15

Time flowed and drifted and sped through their fingers, moments of bliss and pain flashing before their eyes and dying as completely as a flash in the night, leaving only a lingering imprint of light and dark on the back of their eyes.

Mycroft had hoped, as they had all silently hoped, for something brilliant, for a life magnanimous. The perfect second chance that no one in history had ever been granted.

There were moments when he could believe this were true, moments filled with laughter and little boys holding tight to his hands, boys holding the phone so close between them that their cheeks were pressed together as they listened and laughed. Little boys who appeared to all the world as if they had never been anything but blissfully happy.

But Sherlock ate only what he needed to survive, swallowing quickly and perfunctorily, staying perpetually underweight, the miniature cloths he wore seeming to grow larger on his increasingly emaciated form with every passing day. John jumped at the littlest things which no one, even Sherlock, seemed able to predict. The crack of a soda can was enough to make him wince and his eyes grow wide with panic, the sight of a broken toy or a splash of cold water from a yet unheated bath was enough to draw upon his face a look of desolation, as if he believed that nothing would ever be unbroken. As if he where resigning himself to the half life of uncaring squalor.

None of the factors of their original childhoods remained and yet the ill effects of a lifetime of punishment seemed to be weighing down on bodies and minds unequipped for such hardships.

For months Mycroft had kept up the charade with all of the characters of his brother’s former life. It must seem to them as if Sherlock had solved the most gruesome crimes of London from the shores of every remote and unreachably distant country in the world. Scotland Yard, while dropping increasingly worrying hints about their misgivings, were adequately satisfied to have their pedestrian inquiries spelled out for them. One life however, whom he had dreaded from the very beginning, had worked themselves into a frothing rage despite emails and texts meant to sooth and deter.

After four months Harry Watson could not be put off a moment longer.

From the very moment of meeting John Watson, from the first time he had set eyes upon the man in the tiny screen of CCT security systems he had know that the man had a history which bore itself into every breath. Every step he took had been dictated by the past he chose to rise above.

And from the moment Mycroft chose to take John Watson, beautiful enigmatic child, under his care, he had known that he would have to deduce every in and out of the past that even Sherlock had failed to decipher.

He should have found Harry Watson, only surviving blood relation of his charge, the moment he knew a revival of their lives was impossible. But he had wanted to establish a true home. No more new faces tugging horrid memories to the surface, no more parading them around like some sort of second rate circus, gruesome artifacts to be gawked at and prodded until there was nothing left of them but vivisected sacrifice.

So he had waited, imagining that one day he could bring Harry into the fold of their lives and integrate the information he received. He had imagined a day when the memories of their lives had become nothing but the haze of a memory and the panic attacks which dotted their existence so frequently where nothing more than the barely remembered nightmare which dissolves in the morning light.

But his boys never got better. They never forgot the way their lives had begun.

Despite the home they had gained and the laughter they shared, their childhoods had never become something more than something to endure.

And Mycroft had made a crucial mistake which he had never imagined would come to pass.

He had grown to love John Watson.

In the first days of their coexistence there was no immediate bond a parent might share with their child. None of the natural biological imperatives, the chemicals which flood a biological parents mind, had any hold over his analytical brain. He had believed that when the time came he could share this boy with his family, that he could endure the knowledge of his past without feeling even a hint of empathy.

But, as his brother had done before him, he fell.

Brown eyes looked upon him without naiveté but still as if he would do no wrong, as if just by reaching out and touching messy blond hair he could undo all that was wrong in the world. His smile held him enraptured, the way his body was soft and warm as he curled into the nook of his arm and fell asleep with one hand fisted into a crumpled shirt. The way with a look and a touch he could take Sherlock from the brink of chaos and provide a safety Mycroft could only begin to fathom.

Impossible to take a creature he loved more than himself and subject it to the punishment of caustic memories.

And yet Harry Watson lingered on the fringe of their existence, refusing to be charmed by the blogs posted in her brother’s name, by the stories which depicted them as something approaching happy.

She had to be told, to be introduced for the second time.

For her sake and Johns.

Mycroft had to share that which he had come to regard as his own.

 

The facts lay before him like something antiseptic. The facts of her life so far as they were known, an uneventful existence, a middle class job born of a middle class life, a recovering alcoholic with a past of haggard memories. An ex-wife, lost jobs, a family which had become estranged and then erased one by one through the passage of time and cancer and liver failure.

Harry Watson. A lifetime condensed to three sheets of paper and a lifetimes worth of taxes.

John looked up at him from a book for those twice his age and smiled at him, something fleeting and impulsive, before turning back to the pages, thrusting out a little hand to show the coloured page to Sherlock.

He would need more than a background check and few half hearted lookouts to entrust even the knowledge of his wards into her care.

 

They were four years old before John Watson met his sister for the first time.

The memories of their first day of existence had faded in their minds, or at very least they had failed to mention it again, the pools of blood, the darkness of their second birth. Drawings of blood were replaced with dinosaurs and suns and smiling faces. The place in which they lived now was the only home they had ever known, the people who filled their days the only family they cared to know, choosing through actions and silent panic the ones with the power to care for them.

They had grown a little taller, and even John had begun to lose the sweet roundness of the very young. Their voices were still high and bright but they had more words at their command now, words which they more often than not chose to forsake.

Toys were used and broken and forgotten while others grew more loved by the day. The trail of an orange blanket would always lead to two boys lost in each other, a teddy bear peering in a certain direction almost always betrayed where they could be found and more than one misadventure resulted in slight, if rather shocking, explosions.

The boys stood before a thoroughly debriefed Harry Watson as two children who believed that they were, in some strange way, loved.

They could all see the way John was reacting not to the memories but to the feeling of being near someone he once knew. They all knew their parts, knew what would be done for every variance of how he may react.

They had gone over each scenario in triplicate.

Harry seemed to be holding her breath, her smile watery and unsure of itself and of them, not because of any doubt but because they were those alien creatures she had never trusted herself with. They were children, soft and malleable and so very breakable. Her hand shook at her side, fingers twitching to grasp a bottle, a glass. Her smile waivered.

John was not reacting at all in the way the first three scenarios had planned for. His eyes narrowed slightly as if deep in thought and when Sherlock stepped in front of him, shielding him with his own lithe body, John made no move to stop him, only peering over the dark haired boys shoulder, unhurried in his examination.

The strain of inaction was becoming too much not for the children but for the adults involved. Mrs. Hudson was worrying her hands were she stood against the door, endlessly their protective ‘Nana’. Mycroft could see Harry begin to lose her calm the way she had when he had shown her the first video months before. If this stretched out any longer the two women would need to be removed.

They all suppressed a gasp when John walked forward with Sherlock trailing behind him, led by the hand and surprised as the rest of them. John paused and looked at his sister a moment longer with a face of deep thought which betrayed nothing.

And then, like clouds parting and sunlight casting the grey world in a blinding golden hue, John smiled.

He beamed up at his sister the same way he would when he woke up in the morning and the haze of sleep still clung to him and it was as if he knew that today would be a good day. It was the smile he gave them when a plate of cookies was just out of reach but a doting adult was melting beneath his small hands. It was the smile of something good he never knew he could have.

Despite his smile he seemed all of a sudden, shy. His mouth opened and a blush painted his cheeks and his blond hair deliberately fell into his eyes, a shield. His nerves seemed to get the best of him as he took a breath and his words were not those of the four year old he had become but of the lost three year old who had only ever been sure of one thing.

“This is Sher’ock.” John introduced, holding their joined hands out in front of them as if this were the way all introductions were made, a gesture displaying possession and relation and self without the need of any words. A gesture too painfully honest for any adult to even conceive.

John did not feel the need to introduce himself, which was, in its own way, telling, but he did look back and forth between them as if searching for a way to introduce her to Sherlock.

But he had no gesture for her, no smile that meant more, no words to put to a face he almost remembered.

Harry Watson knelt on the floor, knees thumping gracefully into the carpet, hands placed carefully in her lap as per the plan, but the smile was all her own.

“I am Harry.”


	16. Chapter 16

Things were, altogether, going too well. They were not just surviving, they were living. Days were spent in play and work and night found the three of them curled all together in their oversized chair, increasingly difficult books being read as little heads began to droop to his chest.

Mycroft imagined that this was the happiest any of them had ever been.

And he grew foolish and contented.

He let himself fall into the illusion that they were like everyone else, that they were safe.

He should have noticed something was amiss when Mrs. Hudson hugged the boys goodbye and promised to be back in just two days and John got up and curled his arms around her neck and buried his face in her hair and Sherlock only let an arm be draped around him, passive and silent.

He should have known that night when Sherlock did not curl into his side as Mycroft read out loud but instead laid himself across his lap, his tangled head of black hair resting on Johns lap, blue eyes drifting shut almost before they began.

He should have known when John, who at four knew more about Sherlock than he knew himself, climbed from the bed and recovered the human skull from the shelf it had been hidden on, placing it lovingly on the bedside table to gaze down at Sherlock so it would be the first thing he saw when he woke. Sherlock’s gruesome answer to Johns teddy bear.

But he only waited for John to climb back into the bed and kissed each of them on the crown of their heads, never looking back when John’s soft voice began to fill the night air.

It was nearly seven in the morning when Mycroft set down his pen and shut down his laptop.

Sherlock and John should have been up by now, peering into his office and chirping demands for food or issuing sleepy hellos, dressed like colorblind lunatics without their Nana to help them put together appropriate outfits.

But silence reined in the rooms, once the soft clicking of the keyboard had ceased and not even a pencil was scraping across elegant paper the nothingness, that hollow ringing of oblivion, was deafening.

Silence filled by the rapid pounding of his own heart.

The hallways of his private chambers were emptier now than they had ever been. The household staff had been reallocated into different positions. He had found that he did not need them as much now as he once had. The clicking of subdued shoes and antiseptic cleanliness of his former life had been replaced by the screams of children and the slight but livable mess so inherent in their existence.

But now he wished that he had forced the boys to endure the strangers company just a little longer. Just so the hallway to their room would not seem so very void of life, to hear a single sound other than his own breath as he pushed the door open.

John was sitting on the bed, brown eyes wide as they turned to him, trying so very hard to be brave. The stethoscope from a former life was dangling absurdly from his little ears; in the dull light he could almost see the engraving upon its cold metal like an echo. ‘Doctor Watson’. The end was pressed to a pale and heaving chest.

The only sound in Johns terrifying world was the beating of Sherlock’s heart.

The skull had been moved to the bed like an offering, the teddy bear falling against it, button eyes pressing into the sagittal suture. A pale and shaking hand reached past the folds of cloth and the tips of miniscule fingers danced across its gleaming smile, unconsciously tracing its naked cheekbones.

Blankets tangled at his legs, half engulfing and half exposing as if they had been kicked off in a nightmare and never straightened. His small chest and belly heaved with every breath, the desperate pulls for oxygen shaking with unquelled nausea and an inability to catch a legitimate breath. Sherlock’s night shirt had been rucked up beneath his chin so that each prominent rib, every inch of emaciated flesh stood as an accusation as it rose and fell.

The only relief from the nightmare come to life was the small golden hand of John pressing over his heart, measuring each beat as if he could still understand the nuances of the human body deep within his subconscious.

When Mycroft had first stepped into the room had believed that Sherlock had been in a haze of fever, mindlessly reaching out for the comfort of the skull, face turned away from it as if still lost todreams, quieted by sickness as much as choice. But as he sat on the bed, one hand reaching out towards his brother, the other already dialing his phone, he knew better.

Flushed and ill, sweat drenched curls clinging to his skin, and tormented body exposed to garish morning light, all of his weaknesses and deficits put upon display in a way that for Sherlock was enough to bring him to the utmost throes of terror, Sherlock could not take his eyes from John Watsons face.

 

He had not planned for this. There were no contingency plans in place, no onsite medical facilities equipped to handle his shaking body, no undercover guards posted in surrounding hospitals.

There was nothing to do but call for a car and put his hand on Sherlock’s face.

He needed to take his temperature. To ascertain what, logically, needed to be done.

The rational part of his mind sorted lists and prioritized necessities, ran through his limited knowledge about children’s sicknesses and what items he had on hand. His mind analyzed the last few days, the last few hours. A cough, the wiping of a hand against a nose, a misplaced shiver.

Words flowed into his mind so vial he would not let them form.

Statistics like a prophecy of doom.

He was half way to standing, uncertain what the heat under his palm meant, knowing that in this his opinion would be biased, rendered worthless. But the fingers endlessly tracing the contours of the skull had stopped abruptly. With a sick heaving breath which seemed to fill his chest and expand his whole body, stomach lifting and drawing Mycroft’s eyes to the little belly button which seemed somehow obscene and young and private, the hand reached out to him.

Mycroft caught Sherlock’s outstretched hand in his own, wrapping adult fingers to engulf the whole of his hand and the logical part of his mind stopped working.

His child needed help.

 

A disaster of paperwork and endless yellow tape stood between him and the care he wanted not in an hour’s time but right now. So he made it go away.

The flash of a badge, the unrelenting glare of the truly powerful and a single call and everything in the hospital was at his beck and call, his to use and manipulate as he saw fit.

And he gave them Sherlock.

He let the limp body of the barely coherent child be taken from his arms and laid down on the gurney, he watched weak limbs fall and blue eyes open blearily with a panic which had no energy to become even a cry.

Someone on the periphery of his existence was shuffling them out of the room as doctors bent over Sherlock, engulfing him in blankets and needles and monitors. The soft mantra, the useless words of the person trying to block his view and show him into the hall changed and shifted and a cry filled the air.

Mycroft would have no recollection later of what he said or did.

He only knew that the words came out at no more than whisper and the man who had picked up John seemed as if he would faint on the spot, as if his knees were no longer strong enough to hold his weight.

And then John was in his own arms, his blond head burying itself in his neck for one terrified exhalation of breath before twisting in his arms to take advantage of his new height. Arms twirling around Mycroft’s neck as together they stood alone at the edge of the room waiting for a glimpse of a bare foot, or the hint of black curls.


	17. Chapter 17

John

 

It hurt.

It hurt more than the nightmares.

It hurt more than when they saw what no one else could. When they remembered what they had never seen and Sherlock was too afraid to eat and he was too afraid to let go.

Sherlock would not wake up.

He needed to be there. Needed to hold his hand tell him that it was okay to open his eyes.

He needed to make it okay.

He needed to be brave.

But they were swarming around him, like flies to a wound.

Strangers. Grownups with needles and words like a secret language that floated through his mind and got stuck there. Refractory hypotension. Tachypnea. Elevated heart rate. Fever.

Like the entire world was collapsing and Sherlock was in the middle of it all, bringing it down around him.

And he needed him.

But no one understood.

Sherlock did not need the hospital and all of these people and the machines that meant sickness and death and blood and screaming and all of the things that lingered behind his eyes when he woke up.

All he needed was him.

 

He tried to speak, to cry out and tell them to get away, to tell Sherlock that he was here.

But when he opened his mouth no sound came out.

When he twisted Mycroft held him closer.

It hurt; and no one understood.

But then the crowd, the mass of bodies surrounding the too large bed started to disappear and they were moving. The bed, Sherlock, the IV drips and the machinery that whirred and whined slipping down hallways and disappearing behind cold metallic elevator doors.

He could feel the scream working its way up his throat, all the words that had been stolen away threatening to erupt at once, but there was a hand on his back pressing him close until Mycroft steady heartbeat thundered under his ear and they too were moving.

The scream died in the back of his mouth, forgotten and bitter as his thoughts threatened to swallow him, drown him in darkness until there would be nothing left of him to hold Sherlock’s hand.

People everywhere.

Sick.

Coughing.

Bleeding.

Dying.

Machines pumping hearts, forcing air into lungs. Broken bodies waiting to die.

Like screaming men falling, like brown earth turning black with blood.

Useless, helpless hands.

Beds and beds and beds.

Sherlock did not belong here.

And then they were in a room and all of the bodies were gone and the door clicked closed behind them.

And he was there.

And it hurt so much more.

Too small. Sherlock was too small and everything else was too big.

The mask was shocking and fragile and made something in his own chest ache and burn.

Thin plastic engulfed his mouth and nose, fogging with his too rapid breath, changing color with the shallow rise and fall of his chest. The blankets, which did nothing to hide all of the tubes and the wires entwined with Sherlock, stretched on forever in a bed fit for an adult and engulfed a child.

But this time when John squirmed and kicked and needed to be set down his feet touched the floor and finally everything could be alright again.

It took ages to push the chair closer, to climb up on top of it.

It took longer to promise himself that if he touched Sherlock he would not break him.

Slowly, wanting blue eyes to open and see him and need him and seeing only black eyelashes, he reached out. His hand was soft and cold and he tried not to touch the wires and tubes but one brushed his arm and it was plastic and hard and terrible.

The machines towered over them, walls of metal looming the way the world never had before when he was with Sherlock. But now that they were together and it was still just him and he had to be brave and protect him…nothing looked the same. The world was wrong.

But Mycroft was still standing by the door. His phone in his hand and his face like a stone. John knew that face. The face that meant no one would be allowed to touch them. That whatever was bad, whatever had happened would go away and never come back.

So when Sherlock did not wake, even when he whispered that it was safe to open his eyes because they were together again, it was okay.

They would protect him.

 

 

Time did not drift or flow or anything so genial and careless as the wasted seconds of an untried life. It was thick and heavy, each moment was a decision and each beep of a monitor, each mechanical wheeze of a machine was the death of a second they would never have again.

Realistically, in the most analytical part of Mycroft’s mind, he could derive a perfect timeline of events. He could recite the precise minute Mrs. Hudson came in through the door with nothing more than the soft, warm smell that clung to her as a greeting and eyes Mycroft could not bear to meet for fear of the unguarded emotion he could not survive finding reflected in himself. He knew the very second, the precise tracing of Sherlock’s heart which corresponded with the moment his people flooded into the hospital far too late to erase the damage he had done.

He knew the time register in which they deleted all admittance data of a very sick four year old boy. He could recall the unforgiving tick of the clock and the intake of breath Sherlock had taken, a raspy desperate wet sounding thing, when everyone who had come into contact with them, who had seem their faces, was sworn to secrecy.

He could recite the hour, the minute, and the second two people tried to force themselves through the door and become invisible simultaneously. Two vastly different lives and jobs and thoughts held together in two bodies which at that moment held the same look of cultured despair and foreboding.

He would never be able to forget the minute when Sherlock’s heart beat and John curled his little body at the foot of the bed, too afraid to touch but reaching across the sterile white distance to curl in the blankets and almost touch with a delicate sleeping hand the curve of a foot beneath blankets. The minute when Anthea told him in a quiet informative voice that the computer system had been hacked between the interval of their arrival and their subsequent deletion. The minute a solemn faced doctor took her place and uttered words that meant statistics and complications…and the possibility that Sherlock’s heart may not continue to beat.

Mycroft could pinpoint the timeline of the night, knew how many hours had passed, how many agonizing seconds had succumb to them. But irrationally, emotionally, in a totally pedestrian, completely fallible human way, it felt like forever.


	18. Chapter 18

The first of the team of doctors he chose arrived just two hours after Sherlock's arrival at the commandeered hospital. The other six from around the world trickled in over the next 24 hours.

He wanted clashing opinions, he wanted options and possibilities, he wanted a plethora of treatments laid out before him. He wanted hope.

But they all said the same thing; they all had the same look in their eyes that said that when they got the call in the middle of the night and half way around the world they never expected the man at the other end to be another helpless parent.

Not an epidemic.

Not disease a disease jumping the species barrier.

Not a call to arms from the most powerful man they had ever even heard of.

Just a little boy.

They were sworn to secrecy as they relayed the same words over and over again. Every prognoses the same. Each identical and reiterated word echoing within Mycroft making him imagine things he had never predicted for his life.

Emaciated. Dehydrated. Pneumonia. Septic.

Treating with IV fluids, intravenous antibiotics, nutrients, medicine to boost falling blood pressure.

Watching for kidney failure.

Watching for systematic organ failure.

Waiting to intibate.

No one told him the statistics, how many children, even with the best care, survive this.

They were too afraid.

Who could fly half way around the world to tell a man who holds the power of life and death, war and peace in his hands, that a four year old may never wake up?

But he knew.

All of his power, all of his influence, his genius, rendered useless.

He was useless.

Helpless in a way he had not felt since they were children.

And then even though some part of his mind still calculated the seconds, and noted factual events without slant or misconception. The rest of him measured life in the spaces between Sherlock's breaths, value was written only in heartbeats, and Mycroft set down his phone as the door clicked shut behind him, one hand resting on Johns sleeping back and the other holding a small white hand.

He didn't mean to fall asleep. He wanted to stay up in case Sherlock woke up. He needed to be there.

But their words were crushing him, and even when he opened his eyes wide and tried so hard not to blink the images would not go away. Bodies and screaming and uselessness and no Sherlock to make it stop.

He just wanted to close his eyes, to squeeze them tight until there was nothing but darkness and swirls of bright blinding color, to be as small as he could. To disappear just for a moment, disappear so they could not find him.

But when he woke up Sherlock was still asleep, still buried under translucent tubes and wires.

Waking from nightmares of small dark spaces and thundering heartbeats into a reality worse than the ones he could wake up from.

John rubbed the sleep from his eyes with small balled fists, blond hair falling in thick strands down his forehead. If he sat up, carful to touch nothing, only his leg bumping into the blanket, against something soft and giving which could only be Sherlock, he could see black curls and closed eyes.

Mycroft was there. Protecting them. Guarding them.

But the reason he woke was still standing in the doorway. A man in a long white coat like a cape, his cold green eyes flickering over to him with a look of disapproval but he never stopped speaking.

The words floated over him in the gentle haze of just waking up. A sound more than a meaning. But Mycroft's shoulders were stiff, tensing for a fight.

Something was wrong.

And the words didn't disappear so easily now.

Oxygen levels. Bacteria. Pneumonia. Sepsis.

They stuck in his head, in his ears. Echoing over and over. Like a death keen.

Familiar and dark and bad images.

Lungs filled with liquid.

And blood.

So much blood.

And it hurt.

He could not breathe.

And then the talking stopped.

One quick, loud, growl.

Arms picking him up, hands on his ribcage.

Pulling him away from Sherlock but tight against Mycroft's chest, held close and warm and safe.

A heartbeat under his ear fast and hard and so real.

Not like the beeping of a heart monitor.

Footsteps shuffled quickly, the tap of expensive shoes.

The door clicked closed and a kiss pressed to his head, falling on blond hair, only half felt but more an expression of comfort than an actual motion.

He let himself be held, a heart under his ear, thrumming the words from his mind. But his eyes never left Sherlock. Waiting for the moment he would open his eyes.

After that moment, when Mycroft had held him in his arms and his heart had beat loud enough in his ear to drive away the world, loud enough for him to remember how to breath even when the words had gotten stuck in his head and burned in his mind, the adults were not allowed to speak in front of him again.

But that didn't mean he was safe from the words. From the pictures that would not stop.

He did not want to leave Sherlock.

He couldn't.

But Nana Hudson promised he would be safe. That Mycroft would watch him while he was gone.

She let him put their blanket on him and held him up to Sherlock's pale face so he could kiss him, careful and soft.

Only a few minutes.

A trip to the cafeteria for food he would not eat, and then a longer one to the bathroom to wash it all away and he could come back.

They promised everything would be okay.

Different words echoed in his mind, images more powerful than blood and more meaningful than their reassurances.

_Soft blankets over their heads casting an orange glow across their skin, eyes not pleading or demanding but asking, and just a little sad, a small hand touching his face the way he only did when they were alone._

' _You have to trust him.'_

So when Nana Hudson picked him up and carried him away from where Sherlock lay he let her. He twisted in her arms only to watch the door shut between them, saw as the elevator closed around them, the white coats sparing him a look as he disappeared.

They ate, she held him to the glass in the cafeteria and let him choose anything he wanted, pointing out the foods that usually made her frown, the pizza, the tray of individual cakes and puddings shining in their cellophane wrappers.

Together they watched the pizza go cold and congeal on the thin paper plate.

They washed his face and hands in the bathroom, cleaning away the grime and food that was not there, dressing him and tucking away his pajamas at last.

John watched as she pulled out her phone, her face carefully blank as she read it, her smile too wide when she looked away. She said nothing as she picked him up in her arms and held him to her chest even though he was getting to big to be held like that. She held him close as the faceless people pushed by them, ashen people trudging through their own bubbles of existence.

John wondered what they saw when they closed their eyes.

Nana Hudson wanted to go outside, to take a walk. She spoke about the sun and the wind and just a few more minutes even as she reached for her phone, waiting for it to chime.

She went to set him on the ground the way he usually wanted to be, strong and independent and so very grown up. But he held on a little tighter and buried his face in her neck.

He did not want the sun or the wind or a puppy or a toy.

He wanted Sherlock.

He closed his eyes and remembered orange light. He remembered the way they did not speak about it, the way it was just a cough that stuttered his speech, just a tiredness that made nap time a blessing. He remembered promising as blue eyes held him without having to touch him.

Nana Hudson held him tighter, whispering meaningless words as she held her phone to her ear, keeping it carefully away from him, not wanting him to hear the echo of Mycroft's words as she kept her own purposefully meaningless.

And it was wrong.

The looks, the smiles, the phone.

He didn't want to be held anymore.

Didn't want to be touched by them.

He squirmed and wriggled, not wanting to kick or hit, wanting to hurt no one but himself.

And the phone went down, and he went down.

It hurt but it didn't. To fall on his hands and elbows. To scrape his cheek on the floor.

He had to move.

Had to run.

There were people everywhere, mindless and lost and sick, and so many legs, and stairs and gurneys and his Nana was crying his name but the elevator was right there.

He slipped through their legs as the last occupants left, lost in their own minds, in their own torments.

Nana yelled again, louder this time, but no one paid attention to her in din of the lobby.

The doors closed with a ding like the beating of a heart and he was alone as the doors closed on her frantic face.

He memorized the buttons. The hallways. The door.

He knew to follow as if he belonged to one adult or the other, to slip behind a counter or a bed or a desk.

And he made it through the sea of fallen bodies even as the images of more rose in his throat. The only closed door. The only one allowed to be closed because it needed to be protected.

He eyed the doorknob. It was high and round and when he stretched to open it someone would see him. Anyone could pick him up and carry him away because they wouldn't know that he was supposed to protect him! There was no way they could understand.

But the door opened beneath his gaze, two men walking out, their coats like white tails between their legs.

And he ran.

There was a cry behind him but he ignored it. Ran faster. Little legs pumping, working so hard in the blue dinosaur overalls he had been forced into only minutes ago.

He pushed the door as it drifted closed, two palms flat against it, shoving hard, prints of blood.

He was still there.

The beeping of his heart.

The soft almost-not-there-at-all whoosh of his breath.

The chair had been moved and with a grunt of frustration and anger he shoved it back, ignoring the way Mycroft watched him without alarm but with silent worry.

It was hard crawling on top of it. His hands were bleeding and his cheek left a red stain on the fabric but it didn't matter, none of it mattered.

Because when he reached out Sherlock was warm. His hand was soft. And even though he did not sigh or open his eyes or smile it was okay. Because when he did, John would be there.

A word floated into his mind, rising above the rest, dredged from the darkness without sound or concept but filled with implication and meaning.

A tube. Small and yellowish and taped to his face like you could just tape plastic to him, as if it did not mean anything, as if this were not his Sherlock.

A tube that snaked past the mask around his open mouth and into his body, threading through his nasal passage, down his throat and emptying into his stomach with pumps and medication and nutrients.

Just a little tube.

John froze, his hand tightening over Sherlock's placid one, his eyes squeezed shut tight. Mycroft's hand fell on his back, comforting and warm, but it did not stop the way his heart felt like it had frozen in his chest.

It did not matter.

Nothing mattered.

Sherlock was not just going to open his eyes and chase away all of the bad things with a look or a word or a hug.

This was wrong.

Nightmares that were real.

All of the bad things were here, the words and the screams and the fear which crawled up his throat as if he might disappear within them swelled unchecked without him. But this time, even when he opened his eyes, when he remembered to breathe, when the screams and the sound of children crying stopped the bad things did not stop.

This was real.

This, everyone could see.

And he was alone.

John climbed onto the perfect white bed and curled carefully beside Sherlock, closing his eyes against the tubes, not hearing the sounds of machines keeping him alive, pressing his stinging cheek into the rough sheet to try and feel the heat of him. To not exist. To disappear within it.

To fall into memory.

_Sherlock pulled the orange blanket over their heads even as his blue eyes fought to stay open. Sunlight streaming through the window became warm and sweet in their cocoon, the feeling of their shared breathe intimate as a secret as they shared a pillow._

_Sherlock reached for him, little fingers tracing patterns over his cheek, holding and memorizing, eyes fighting to stay open to make the moment last. Sentimentality that made Johns heart hurt. Like looking into a clear blue sky and knowing it was going to rain._

_Somewhere out in the world outside of their haven Mycroft closed the door softly behind him. Another layer around them._

' _You have to trust him.'_

_John opened his mouth to speak but the look on Sherlock's face stopped him, the sweet sadness he should never have mixing with something more heartbreaking. It was the look Sherlock only gave him when he though John was not looking, the look he pretended to be asleep just to see._

_The look that made it feel like he would never be alone._

' _If I am not here-'_

_He could not help it. It was not a word that came out of his mouth, but a soft, wretched, sound. Any words he might have said were stolen when Sherlock held his face in both hands, needing him to listen, needing the words to exist between them._

_The touch fought off the panic that wanted to seep into their golden world._

' _If I am not here with you…' Soft and serious and imploring. 'You will be okay.'_

_He did not realize he was crying until Sherlock wiped at his face, catching his tears in pale fingers._

_Why was he crying?_

_Blue eyes blinked sleepily at him. Too tired for midday. Too tired to be okay. On his lips ghosted the hint of a smile, one knowing and warm. His skin seemed to glow in the orange light and streams of pure white._

_Sherlock was warm as he wriggled closer, wrapping John in his arms and pressing a kiss to his wet cheek, holding him so close that his heart was in his ear and his words were on his skin._

' _You will be brave.'_

' _Sherlock-' Denial. Refusal._

' _John-' Not stern but imploring. Asking in a way he never dared to for anything._

' _I will be brave.' John whispered as he tried to fight back the tears even as the cloth of Sherlock's shirt grew damp beneath his eyes. He swallowed and let the words choke back into his mouth. 'But…promise I will not need to be.'_

_But by the time his words filled the air Sherlock was already asleep in his arms._

_He told himself it did not matter._

_It was just a dream. It was all the bad things in his mind seeping into their reality, the parts Sherlock would not tell him, the parts that made him go quiet and cold._

_If the bad things were real…_

_If they could hurt them…_

_But they were not real. They were safe._

_He would never need to uphold his promise._

_He would never need to be alone._


	19. Chapter 19

Life with children was…complicated. Mycroft was at loathing to say difficult. So many negative connotations attached to the word. As if they were a burden, as if their 'difficult' could be compared with a tsunami or world hunger. But it was not what he imagined raising children would be. It was nothing like his own upbringing, nothing like movies or books or others would lead him to believe.

Coexisting with his two little charges meant existing in the midst of indescribable happiness mixed indiscriminately with abject terror.

There had been days of helplessness, of watching his little brother suffer in a way he had never before managed. Each procedure had been laid out before him, each blip of a monitor meant something finite and indisputable. This time around Sherlock could not hide his suffering, each symptom, each pain laid out in a way his adult self would never allow. If Mycroft was honest, in a way a conscious baby Sherlock would not allow.

He watched the medicine fail to bring him back, the nutrients fail to revitalize his limp limbs, he watched as his breathing grew shallow and ineffective. He had gathered John into his arms and let himself be led from the room when Sherlock could no longer breathe on his own and had tried to explain to a silent four year old doctor what it meant to intubate a patient while keeping his racing heart within the confines of his chest.

And then, when long silent days had passed them by, he watched the same doctors, the ones who had told him with solemn eyes that Sherlock may never wake, smile, and tell him that he was breathing on his own. He watched the ill pallor fade to comparatively vibrant cheeks, watched the weight loss halt and then ,reluctantly, turn in the other direction.

Indescribable happiness in a sea of sorrow.

But even as the worry for Sherlock ceased to plague his every moment, a more subtle slow burning worry had already begun to establish itself in his heart.

Sherlock grew better by the day. His little hand would close around his larger fingers when Mycroft sat by his bedside, his eyes fluttering beneath the lids as if deciding when the perfect moment to wake from beneath the drugs and fatigue would be.

Everything should have been perfect. A miracle.

But he had watched two boys fall.

He had watched the way John seemed to forget how to speak, as if the other boy had been his voice all along. He watched his once healthy appetite falter, eating only when prompted, not refusing food but apathetic towards it.

Mycroft noted every day which John woke without a smile on his face.

Mycroft had imagined that as Sherlock regained his strength that John would come back to himself. That recovery would be quantitative; each definite step in Sherlock's recovering marking one in John until they were the same boys who had accepted their place in the world with such unparalleled grace. He had imagined that the boy he had come to know was only beneath the surface of this new ennui.

But Sherlock was warm under his fingertips and John sat like a statue upon the edge of the bed, not as if he were unaffected but as if he could no longer see. As if his reality no longer meshed with that which the rest of the world perceived. As if he were too far gone to see that Sherlock was returning to him.

Mycroft wanted to call Harry, to have her brought to him and demand all of the information they both knew she had withheld in all of their meetings. The history so buried that not even he had been able to formulate more than a vague impression of truth and the million vivid possibilities that haunted him in the way their reality haunted john.

But it was impossible. A wishful fancy.

She had been informed in the most vague and meaningless way of the situation but Mycroft wondered if even those scraps of information had penetrated the saturated din of her mind.

Unconsciously he flipped to the reconnaissance data of her current life. The alcohol, the failed relationships, the inability to go through a single day without doing something to sabotage her own happiness. Mycroft flicked the phone off and set it heavily into his pocket, eyes unblinking as he repressed the urge to gather John to himself and hold him where the world could never touch him again.

Impossible that this child could have grown to share his sisters fate, that whatever life had given them so long ago he was able to become the man he had been, the man who had cared unconditionally for Sherlock, the man who had made Sherlock care, instead of becoming something so much…less.

But the melancholy was dragging his eyelids low, the tension of illness and worry drifting from him at long last leaving him deficit.

He could do nothing. Could not even reach out and pull his boys towards him, to hold them in his arms and whisper false platitudes in their ears as if they were all just people.

One lost in sickness and the other lost in himself.

Mycroft's hand curled around his phone unconsciously, waiting for it to buzz or chime, waiting to save the world with a few words, as if it might hold all of the answers, even to this, if only he knew how.

Nearly a day had passed since even the most cautious of the doctors had told him that Sherlock would survive this. He himself had watched the slow progression into recovery, the way the alarms connected to his little body rarely issued their shrill warning any longer, the way his breath came out not in a painful shallow rattling but in the soft warm way of children lost deep in sleep.

But the worry, however illogical, refused to abate completely. Like he was waiting for something he could not name, some final clue, before he could believe that this life had not been taken away from him.

The sleep he fell into was as uncomfortable as the plastic chair he rested upon, light and suffering, unwilling. As his eyes at last slipped closed he dreamt of John, reticent as a stone angel, keeping carful guard at the foot of Sherlock's bed. Perfect and untouchable.

Only a few hours could have passed by unmarked as he slept. The light from the window had changed; the sunlight coming through the window in milky streams, minutes still separated the morning light from touching the faces of his sleeping boys.

But in those few hours everything had changed.

With more surety than all of the words of the doctors.

With more heart than every reassuring nuance of beeping machinery clicking in time with a silently beating heart.

John, their tiny stone angel who had sat endlessly on the end of Sherlock's bed, too afraid to touch, afraid to leave, had found it in himself to move.

They were curled together beneath the curves of tubes and wires, child arms entangled hopelessly, faces so close that they shared a breath, two tiny hands measuring the rise and fall of each small chest.

They were going to be alright.

It happened silently, without fuss, so soft and simple that had Mycroft not been marking every breath, every heartbeat, he would have missed it. The moment Sherlocks eyes opened again for the first time.

Sherlock did not wake as he did as an adult, with sudden vicious awareness, not as he woke when nightmares plagued his sleep, blue eyes wide as terror slips through his mind, erasing all but a lingering taste of itself. It was a fluttering of black lashes against pale cheeks. It was sleepy blue eyes peering carefully into the world searching for a reason to hold on.

It was dry, chapped lips beneath an oxygen mask pulling up in a weak smile, just a hinting of life at the edge of his mouth.

It was finding John Watson laying by his side, brown eyes catching and holding him and pulling him back into the world.

Hands reaching out and brushing hair, a cheek.

It was John Watson smiling for the first time in so long that Mycroft had forgotten the way his heart would thump at the sight.

It was the silence of a kiss pressed to the plastic of a mask, of kisses pressed into wet eyelashes and hands that met and held and could not seem to let go.

In the end it was only two minutes of lucid wakefulness. Two minutes of tired blue eyes.

But it was enough.

Everyone knew it. It was written across anything and everything, like a prophesy of doom but not nearly so dramatic or escapable.

It was in the look Mrs. Hudson gave him as Sherlock acquiesced to being carried inside the house only because he was too lost in sleep to protest. It was in every word John refused to say, lingering in the silences that hung in the air with the echo of his lost voice.

It was written in the way John looked over Sherlock as if he were looking at his own soul, looking at him with eyes that were simultaneously those of a lost four year old boy and a grown man.

They were not, and never would be, like anyone else had ever been in the history of man kind.

There was no guide book, no comparisons to be drawn, no way to extract the old memories and make them real just as there was no way to destroy what lingered.

He could not pretend that he could raise these two boys and give them a good life, a life they deserved. He was like the child he could not remember being. Saving an injured animal and hiding it away out of love, making a bed out of scraps, a balled up shirt, a dish of water and a handful of grass and never figuring out what else it needs to survive.

But he was all they had.

Not a mother and never a father.

Barely a brother.

But it would have to be enough.


	20. Chapter 20

His thoughts were the first thing to come back. Before the fatigue that held him pinned to the bed gave the first hint that it would ever go away, even as the heat flashed over his body in waves and left him cold and shivering and empty in its wake. He could think before his voice was enough to mutter Johns name and have it be even close to recognizable in his own ears.

It burned.

To hear him and not be able to reach out, to lay in darkness and do nothing but wait for the bodies to come in, to mutter to him as if he might be asleep and put their hands on John so carelessly the way he could not do with all of his energy.

Like he was going mad with want even when John lay next to him and held his hand.

It was not enough.

John was his and so close and he couldn’t…

And then his body was coming back but it was not his, not like before. Each motion cost him hours of rest, hours of his mind wandering where he could not lead it, falling into dark evil places. To reach out and touch was almost more than he could do, but he tried anyway. Succeeded anyway. Most of the time.

To feel John under his hand, safe and warm and his, and when his hand fell short, when his effort was wasted and the back of his eyes stung and the sound died in his throat and it all burned like acid a hand would close over his and bring his palm flat over a cheek, over his heart, pressed against kisses he could not reach out for on his own. And then he would smile. In the darkness, like none of it mattered, like no one else mattered but them, just for him, he would smile in a way that almost felt like happiness.

John did not talk anymore.

Nana Hudson would sit with them and ask what story they wanted to read and he would wait for John to speak for them both and the silence would come heavier than before and they would all lie beneath it until she smiled like it hurt and picked a book and cuddled them to her as she read like they might break in her arms.

That would be okay. If John did not want to talk for them. If he wanted to save his voice just for them.

But John never even whimpered in his sleep now, he would not cry, if he fell he would not make a noise beyond an almost silent whoosh of breath before standing up with blank eyes. But worst of all, the whispered bubbling words that followed Sherlock into sleep when the darkness pressed in and threatened to drown him, the words that came when they were wrapped tight against each other so that nothing could get them, had died too.

But if he did not want to speak Sherlock would not make him. And if the others tried to make him he would stop them.

It was alright even if it was not. Because John was warm and close and when he looked into his eyes it was all there like the words were still in his head without John saying a thing. The pain and hurt and despair and worry and the yes and yours and it’s okay now.

He would be John’s voice.

 

Everyone thinks he is sleeping but he is not. He does not want to sleep, he slept too long already. What if John needs him and he misses it because he is weak and sleeping? What if next time he wakes up and John loses more than just his voice?

But he is too tired to move.

So he lies there.

Wishing to move.

Thinking of ways to make John better again.

But maybe he does not need one to fix the other.

John does not tell him, cannot tell him in more than looks and the press of his body but Sherlock knows what has stolen his voice, what has taken this comfort away from him.

The dreams that come in the day.

He does not know if everyone has them, if Nana and Mycroft and the whole world have them and no one ever talks about them because they hurt or they go away if you pretend they do not exist. He does not want to ask.

He does not want to explain.

To admit he has them if no one else does. He does not want them to know, even if they already do.

They would ask and they would not understand. Maybe they forgot what it was like, maybe they have spent so long pretending that they went away by themselves and if he mentioned it they would come back in a flood and hurt them.

He does not want to hurt them.

Maybe no one else has dreams like that, so real that they stop and you still can’t breathe and you can feel the water in your mouth and you are drowning even when you are not.

But John does.

And he needs to protect John.

They make the dreams go away, they always have. They keep each other from falling too far. Whispers and hands and arms that make the thoughts stop and they never drown, they never get crushed.

But John did. All by himself he could not make them stop.

And maybe if he makes the dreams come, if he searches them out and lets them happen and the darkness swallows him and he finally falls, drowns, starves, freezes, suffocates, dies then he can help.

He can make John okay again, he can teach him how to be okay and never leave him again.

They all think he is sleeping, but he is not.

 

It is like living in two worlds at once, worlds that have nothing to do with one another and neither knows the other exists.

Like being two people at once and neither at the same time.

If he died in one would he slip effortlessly into the other, no longer sure which is the dream and if either are real?

Mycroft is picking him up and holding him in his arms and he is alone in the dark and it is impossibly cold like he will never be warm again and his wrists burn where they touch metal.

Mycroft is speaking but the words wash over him because he is cold, too cold to think, frozen, and words like ‘food’ and ‘eat’ and a desperate, impossible whispered ‘please’ do not make sense and he thinks ‘brother’ and that does not make sense either. How can food matter when you can no longer feel your fingers move?

And he thinks ‘John’ and he is ready to die. To freeze. But he doesn’t.

He stopped shaking; it stopped being cold at all. How could he have ever thought this was cold? But he can still see his breath in the air and that is wrong. And it is all darkness, blues and blacks and he cannot move but there is another body. Not Mycroft. Even though Mycroft is still there, still begging him to eat without begging at all.

He needs to die! To freeze! For John. But there is a voice, heavy and not cruel, but somehow that makes it worse. Apathetic.

‘Remember this.’ And he does. He will.

“Sherlock please.” And this time it is begging. But he can’t, not yet.

It is just fear. Just the twists of empty hallways. But it does not hurt to exist. Somewhere he is lying down with his eyes closed and John is warm, his hair is soft where it is tucked under his chin, his breath on his neck, somewhere else he wanders alone.

Nana is there. She is carrying him and John is reaching up to hold his hand but he is too far away so he smiles and John pretends to believe him. It is warm, hot, and his skin is already turning pink under the intense sunlight but the water is cool and welcoming, his head bobs above the water and there is no one else around. Just the sound of a car nearby stopping too quickly, the slamming of a car door.

Nana runs the tap on the tub and water and bubbles fill the bath, warm and welcoming, splashing, gushing.

Someone else near the water. Not mad, talking to him. He wants to swim away but he does not. They have swim trunks on and the water is so cool. The man laughs.

Nana moves to take off Johns shirt but he takes a step back, worry and fear not needing words. She murmurs soothingly but he takes Sherlock’s hand in his and buried his face in his palm, eyes pressing into his hand. She ruffles his blond hair and Sherlock can feel the breath of relief against his skin. John looks carefully up as she walks out of the room.

The man is in the water, he is coming closer but he cannot see his face.

‘Do the stroke I taught you.’

And he does. He moves his legs behind him and kicks perfectly, he slides forward in the water like a fish and he can see the way his bare arms look yellow under the surface of the water as they stretch out before him. Beneath him the bottom of the lake is lost in darkness and the water is colder when his feet kick just a little too low. He likes the top where the water is warmer.

He does not like the cold.

Mycroft is kneeling on the ground in front of them, carefully lowered to one knee and he looks pained. John is sitting on the ground behind him, his brown eyes watching them both and he is so tired and he wants to sit down too but he has to be strong. He hears his own voice without ever deciding to use it.

“I will take care of him.”

And when Mycroft leaves the room and the pain has nothing to do with his knees it is John who helps him take off his clothing and helps him into the tub. It takes a moment too long but there is trust and gratitude in his face and John follows him in with one parting glance to his long sleeved shirt. John holds him up above the level of the water when the effort of sitting becomes too much.

The man is closer now and he is talking, saying something, his smile is huge, like he has a secret, and it is probably important but Sherlock cannot think. He knows that look.

The water is cooling but John is warm against his back and there are hands in his hair, maybe Mycroft will not be upset if they are both clean.

The water is cold. The water is dark and everything is sick yellow brown and when he kicks the silt kicks up until he cannot see anything at all even though his eyes are wide open. The silt swirls around him and when he screams the water in his mouth is cold.

He is panting and John is holding him tight and he can almost feel the words that are not coming, like Johns throat is his own, but a trickle of water passes his lips and he cannot breathe.

He screams again but this time it comes out silent. The sound nothing but a reverberation in the water, useless. He should not have done that.

His lungs burn and everything else is cold, the cold is seeping into him, infiltrating his bones, his organs. Silt and water in his mouth, in his eyes. A ring around his ankle of burning flesh, fingers trapping him, hot and hard and not letting go.

John is breathing deep and fast against him as if he could breathe for both of them. His body is light and useless and it is easy for John to turn him in his lap and hold his face with both hand so that their foreheads are touching and John is breathing against his mouth and brown eyes are pinning him in place, begging the way Mycroft begged.

He wants to scream again, wants to beg, he looks up and the sun is streaming down at him, almost visible through the water. The hand on his ankle is still there but there is slack, he kicks up and his hand breaches the surface. Hot, warm, air.

The slack runs out, fingers tighten around his ankle.

He sobs into the water.

A wet hiccupping breath and Sherlock realizes that the water in his mouth tastes wrong. Salty and warm. He is not crying, but John is.

Black, around the edges the world is going black and it burns and his lungs are screaming and he takes another mouthful of cold dirty water.

He cannot give up. He has to figure this out. For John. John hiccups through his tears. It is the first sound he has made.

He wants to give up. Has to give up. He cannot kick anymore. His arms will not move. The world is going black.

And the hand lets go and somehow he moves. He breaches the surface and for one horrible second there is air everywhere but he is so full of water he cannot breathe.

The hand has caught him again. He wants to cry out but he does not have the time. One quick breath.

He coughs, deep and raspy and wet and his breath is gone and he wants to cry.

He coughs, deep and raspy and wet and John is crying.

The water is cold and half in his mouth and he will not survive and everything is murky yellow brown and the sun is gone even when he looks up.

There is a yell, a curse, and the sound of a door being thrown open. Expensive shoes on wet tile and he is in the water and he is dying and he is in Mycroft’s arms gasping and John is pulling at Mycroft’s arm until he too is picked up and the three of them stay like that, holding on and wet, and breathing and crying.

He was so close.

Next time he will not fail John.


	21. Chapter 21

He wants to calm John, wants to tell him everything will be alright but he cannot come that far out of the darkness now, not if he tried. John will understand later, it will be worth all of this.

All he can manage to do is be quiet and breathe as Mycroft and John dry him off and dress him like he is still in the hospital and he cannot move.

He has not slept in days, not really, and the taste of his body eating itself is always in his mouth now, John winces when he smells it on his breath, Mycroft shuts his eyes and tries to wipe all the emotion off of his face as he carries him into the kitchen. He does not quite manage it.

He is tired and cold and he knows his body is shutting down and he is not sure where he learned that but he knows it is true. And he will eat.

Just as soon as he finds a way to help John find his voice again.

He wishes he had explained it before because they are all staring at him and they do not understand and he can no longer find the words himself because he is not there at all.

He remembers the mess he made. He remembers the way it felt between his fingers, the careless way he had wiped his face with the back of his hand.

He remembers that look. That half smile, crooked and thoughtful and wrong.

He remembers pain, and the smell of the food still stuck on his skin as he was pinned in place. Words in his ear that he does not try to remember.

He remembers the tests and never knowing what was a test and what was survival.

Being taught not to want even as his stomach ate itself, to sit and watch and not touch, to not reach out.

‘Don’t show your cards.’

‘Don’t show weakness.’

‘Don’t show how much you want it.’

He remembers failing. Reaching out, wanting, needing.

He remembers pain.

Nana Hudson is circling the kitchen too fast, her hands are everywhere like they have minds of their own, moving endlessly. She keeps her face turned towards the cabinet and she always takes a breath before she turns around and there is always a brittle smile on her lips that does not reach her eyes.

John has pushed their chairs together so that there is no space between them, heat and comfort running from his ankle up to his shoulder where their bodies are pressed together.

He knows hunger, the taste that rises in the back of your mouth and coats your teeth and makes you think of burning muscle. The way acid saliva fills your mouth and you swallow it down and it is sharp on your tongue and as soon as you swallow it fills your mouth again.

He can feel the cold that never leaves his limbs and the way it is just a little bit harder to move, like life takes just a little more effort.

But it does not hurt. Not the way reaching out and needing and wanting hurts.

So he finds somewhere alone and dark and when he lies down and can do nothing but think because everything takes so much more effort and thinking has always been easy, it is simple to learn not to feel. Easy to forget the pangs of starvation and fade into thought, like he was never really human at all.

Nana Hudson puts a plate in front of him, puts a plate in front of everyone, the four of them sitting around a single table. She is trying to temp him. There are bowls of food set out. Everything that had ever made him smile, everything he had ever snuck while they pretended not to look.

It was another test. Or not. The plate of food in front of him is hot and the smell hits his him like a punch to the gut and acid fills his mouth and he tries to forget he ever knew the taste of it. The smile on the man’s face is expectant.

‘Go on.’ He says.

Mycroft fills his plate, fills Johns plate. No one reaches for their fork.

Nana Hudson looks close to tears and Sherlock wonders how long it has been since he has eaten and why everyone is looking at him like he is about to break.

He shakes his head, pushes the food away, careful not to touch anything but clean porcelain.

The man smiles again and Sherlock watches as he finishes everything on his plate.

Mycroft is swirling a fork through some potatoes but his eyes flit between Sherlock and the cell phone set on the table and he never lifts the fork to his mouth. When he says something about going back to the hospital Nana Hudson hides her mouth behind her napkin and refuses to look at him.

Sherlock is enjoying the warmth of John next to him, pressed hard against him, so when he sits up straighter, clambering to sit on his knees to reach the table better he has Sherlock’s careful gaze on him.

Sherlock watches as John in a perfect sick imitation of the other world pushes the plate away from himself, brown eyes avoiding even looking at the food.

No.

No.

Sherlock scrambles to his knees and is pulling the plate back in front of John, carefully not flinching when his hand brushes against something not cold and hard.

He turns and finds that John is already looking at him, the same sad expression on his face that Mycroft and Nana were trying so hard to hide. John takes a deep breath and it fills his tiny figure, his chest rising and he shocks all of them when he does not give Sherlock a chance to speak.

“Not without you.”

And he is cold and hungry and acid is filling his mouth and his body is eating itself and all of a sudden it does not hurt anymore.

He does not kiss John even though he wants to.

He looks down at his hand and sees the blob of mashed potatoes on it and he smiles, reaches onto Johns plate and takes the first thing his fingers touch without looking at what it might be and it is warm and squishy and finally his mouth doesn’t taste like acid and hunger and starvation.

When Sherlock takes a carrot from his own plate and offers it to John the laughter he gets in return eases the ache in his heart.

The next hour is spent feeding each other and stealing off of each other’s plates and laughing and Sherlock doing silly things just to get John to comment on them.

In another world Sherlock waits until the man is gone and the food is cold and minutes tick by like days before he feels safe enough to steal some of the food off of his own plate. Sherlock sees it in his mind but it is fading now. Dream and reality are separating and John is warm and pushing a bit of cookie into his mouth and even though he is full he lets him do it because he needs to see that smile.

Nana is laughing and talking with John. Their eyes have lit up like they have never been so very alive and Sherlock notices how different everyone looks through their smiles.

Just a little haggard.

Tired.

Drawn.

Mycroft is silent when Sherlock rounds the table slowly, too full to move quickly.

Sherlock has his hands tightly closed around something and Mycroft obediently holds out his own hands to receive his gift.

Sherlock offers a small thankful smile too emotionally complicated for a child and too revealing for an adult as he places the object in his brothers hand.

“For you.” Sherlock nods at him once, almost awkwardly, in an echo of the man he once was and will never be and then he is gone, hand in Johns, the two of them whispering loud enough only for the adults to disconcert the undeniable sound of children in the room.

Mycroft is glad he is already sitting down when he opens his palm to and finds that a gently crumbling cookie had been placed in his hands.


	22. Chapter 22

Mycroft had begun wars with a word. He had taken lives, saved others and sacrificed still more. He had lived what would be, logistically, one of the most influential lives of the twenty-first century.

In the span of his life he had done more than the average Londoner can begin to conceive for a hundred such life times.

But this year, this one year, felt like a victory to have survived.

Wars raged and people starved and the world remained eternally teetering on the edge of chaos but they had survived.

They were alive and healthy and if he wanted to he could follow the sounds of laughter and scoop them up in his arms and not let go. He could hear John whisper softly in his ear as his little arms wrapped around his neck in a delayed embrace. He could hold Sherlock in his arms so close that he could feel the little chest rising against his own, hold him until black curls laid against his chest and he knew that his brother was listening to the beating of his heart.

This year was a victory for not losing all of the things he had never dreamed he could never live without.

Time in relation to small children is different than with adults, it is sharper, each day infused with more life.

The life of a fifty year old is no different than that of a fifty two year old. They have the same abilities, the same impediments.

Life flows or it halts but each activity can be repeated, age no longer affects life. Decades spent in stagnation.

But two years away from the three year old children who had fallen into his lap was like watching sand fall through an hourglass. The curved round sweetness of their bodies had melted away, fading into lengthening limbs. The boys, who had once fit so easily in his arms together as if they belonged nowhere more than there, were now a jumble of limbs and curls.

Secret languages and fragmented words grew into increasingly difficult sentences. Words were strung together so effortlessly it was as if they had always held such power, even if they chose more often than not to use a blinding smile or doleful eyes to gain favors instead of words.

These were transformations which would take years to complete and he wanted to be there for every second of it, to hold each moment in his hands even as it slipped away.

So with the taste of the hospital lingering on the back of their tongues, with silent nightmares lingering behind tired eyes and harsh reminders peppering their lives behind firmly shut bathroom doors and silent tense meals he could little be blamed for feeling like this year was a victory to be savored.

A victory to prove that they could do more than survive- they could thrive.

They could make memories that he could be proud of.

Imagine Sherlock’s face as he knew it would form in twenty years and seeing the echo of this day in his expression, an echo of laughter replacing haunted eyes.

At least this is what Mycroft told himself as the inevitable complications of his horrible idea began to formulate.

Mummy had taken less persuading than would have been expected, but no less than Mycroft had anticipated. In the months following Sherlock’s illness, in the slow days of recovery, it was easy to lay the proper groundwork for a future they could all hope to share. Tactical planning 101, never waste an opportunity.

If Sherlock had not necessarily woken from a particularly violent nightmare as Mycroft may have implied and Mummy had not called specifically to talk to him neither of them would ever have to be the wiser. All Sherlock had to know was that the woman on the other end of the phone was somewhere very far away and sounded very sweet and made John laugh as they pressed the earpiece between them. All Mummy had to know was that Sherlock could lie there and listen to her speak and be glad for it.

Calls went from an anomaly to an expected occurrence. It was not uncommon to see the two boys laying together with the phone between them, the cord twisted around their limbs like an ineffective straight jacket, or to see one or the other marching around the flat with the portable stuck between their shoulder and cheek leaving their hands to whatever misdeed had caught their attention.

Mycroft was not below reminding Mummy of the instance on which she had texted him while still on the line with Sherlock.

‘S is asking about duration of flammability of couch. Check living room ASAP. <3 ’

‘Also blue desk lamp. <3’

He had managed to secure the improvised electrical starter with only the smell of singed velvet in the air as a reminder when he caught the flash of a small, disconcerting smile on Sherlock’s face and his phone vibrated once more in his pocket.

‘Real experiment is a small explosive (and really darling you must be more careful you know how S can be) in J’s front overalls pocket. <3’

 

With the increased span of time which the two had been exposed to each other and the insistent promise that it was having no detrimental effect on Sherlock’s well being Mummy agreed, after hours of analytical breakdowns of all possible factors, to see the boys face to face once more on a trial basis.

Which was of course how Mycroft got himself here, with two newly minted five year old waiting for their big surprise and Mummy waiting in the unused guest lounge, presumably going over a lab work up but in actuality, researching the psychology of amnesia patients.

Which would be bearable, if strange, if one Harry Watson was not late and waiting at the front door to be let in by a fretting Mrs. Hudson who refused to let the temporary house staff/trained body guards do any of their assigned jobs.

Harry Watson had been a decidedly more risky decision. She had no security clearances, a clean if somewhat dingy past, and absolutely no training in any field relevant to their continued existence. If everyone who knew about their boys was taken simultaneously into captivity and tortured she would be the first to fail. It was not a reflection of her character in any way, it was simply fact.

But she had something with John that no matter what he could never have. Even if John was his, even if John loved him and it was to him that he would run to when an adult, when a parent, was necessary, he would never hold the past John had forgotten. Even if he accumulated and selfishly stored away every story of his first existence it would never belong to him the way the shadow of Sherlock existed in him.

He did not want Harry to be John’s family. She had been given her chance and she had failed.

She had failed John the way he had failed Sherlock.

But this time, this time she had not demanded to be in his life. She had not been there when he cried, she had not spent long days watching him fade.

John was his now and he did not want to share. But that would not stop him from doing what was right for John. His past held in the mind of a woman with no more control over her life than any of the millions of people existing just outside of their door.

Worth the effort, the hazard, if it won him that instant, blinding, smile.

But Mycroft was not the only one with reservations. Mycroft had begrudgingly had to readjust his opinion of the woman when she blatantly refused the invitation to their birthday without explanation.

It had taken a week, three phone calls, and exactly two and three quarters bottles of wine before her resolve had broken and had given him, in a rush of thick tumbling words, the data he required.

She would take them on camping trips, she would watch three hour recitals just to get a glimpse of him for three minutes and sit through monotonous teachers meetings. She would do everything that had never been done for him in the past but she would not ruin the first birthday that he had ever a chance to be happy.

Mycroft switched off his not-quite-secure-enough phone, made sure the boys were still asleep in their bed, tucked into each other and oblivious to the world, and woke up Mrs. Hudson. Their self appointed Nana had fallen asleep in the large armchair by their bed, the one from which she had kept a vigil even after the days Sherlock had regained enough weight to put him out of danger and with a quiet apology and obligatory muttering from her, he was gone.

It was three and one fourth’s bottles of wine by the time a blinking Harry buzzed him into her empty flat.

Mycroft tried to explain John’s triggers, the things that made him go silent and the things that made him scream.

He was slightly cruel, cold in a way he had not been since he had learned that two boys were watching his every move. He watched her face as things that had been harsh surprises for him registered in memories written across her expression. Her past in his present.

The way she tugged at her shirt sleeves when he spoke of how John hid himself, the way her fingers danced unconsciously at her throat when he recounted in short painful words what it was like when John would not talk. The way she took another deep pull of wine, the smell of it thick in the air even as the empty bottles were placed behind the counter as if their empty presence was one of shame that could not be adequately hidden.

It was nothing he had not imagined but it was less than he had hoped for.

She had gotten off easy. The oldest of two siblings.

Like him.

Maybe it was that the youngest was the easiest target. Maybe it was a trick of happenstance and time, of a dozen factors contributing to which child would fall and which would be left hatefully untouched.

She offered him a glass of wine as she poured herself another. Three and one half. He declined.

But only just.

He watched her physical reactions, her tells, as he told his piece and wondered if she understood what he could read in her gestures, if she was willing giving away the information she could not tolerate to verbalize.

Someone was a drinker. Someone close to them, someone they were dependent on.

Father.

He had been unrepentant about his drinking, unlike Harry who only pretended to be so. Shame to be like him, not just in drinking but to share any traits, a desire to downplay the genetic connection.

This was not the first time John had stopped talking. There had been no surprise, but a flinch of recollection. Not medical, that would not have merited such a reaction. Environmental then. Situational imperative.

She had never suffered such an affliction. That flinch was all for John.

The flinch of the witness, of unspoken guilt, merited or otherwise.

He waited for her to finish her thought, watched the emotion play out and tried to determine what it all meant for his John. But he was too close, too biased.

That had never happened before.

When she wordlessly handed him the glass of brandy he accepted, examining the golden liquid as it glinted in the cheap crystal glass.

He held the glass to his lips, let the liquid touch his lips, let the smell engulf that of wine and guilt.

He knew she was thinking of her brother, not the man that he had met in that empty car park with the tremor in his hand and the gunshot wound in his shoulder but the brother who looked like the John currently at home asleep in his bed.

He asked what birthdays had been like for them.

Harry smiled and then laughed in a way that held no humor, the kind of laugh that one hears at funeral homes made by those who never learned how to cry.

When she sat back in her chair and the laughter had died on her lips, appearing far too lucid for someone with such a blood alcohol level, her eyes were unblinking and serious and beyond tears and ill humor. She took a deep breath as if steeling herself and then at the last moment words failed her and with a self pitying smile looked at Mycroft apologetically.

‘I just can’t’

Why not her? Why not him?

Because they were older? Because they were less beautiful? Because of some trick of fate?

Why had they escaped, even if they had not?

He set the glass down with an thump; it burned his dry lips, stung as he changed his posture, less deliberately friendly, more the heartless misanthropic genius he had always been until two years before.

‘Make no mistake Ms. Watson, I am not asking for propriety’s sake.’ Her eyes widened almost comically, the alcohol in her mind taking a back seat to the new threat before her. Something cold and hard rose in Mycrofts chest, an anger that in the past would have been feigned, his hand curled around the top of his umbrella forcefully as if in an effort of restraint.

What right did they have to be weak?

‘John is mine. Do not harbor any illusion that you could bring harm if you dedicated your life to the effort.’

The doorknob was cold and hard under his burning hand. He saw Sherlock’s cold blue eyes in his mind, before John, before John Watson showed him what it meant to be human.

‘I will see you then.’

 

“My-cough” A little hand pulled at his sleeve.

All thoughts of the two women who were complicating his life disappeared under the force of the five year old's fierce pout and drawn black eyebrows which would have him believe his little heart was being systematically crushed by every moment Mycroft was not paying attention to him.

“Regressing Sherlock? You know very well how to say my name.” The pout grew more intense but it was betrayed by the spark of laughter he let out as Mycroft swept him up in his arms.

“Down!” He yelled through the fit of giggles fueled by the excitement of anticipation and the sugar of the ‘secret’ cookies as much as by the way Mycroft swung him through the air.

“Down? Are you sure?” Mycroft snuck a look at gleaming blue eyes and the broad grin just at the edge of his peripheral vision. “If you insist.” He answered with an affected board shrug.

Sherlock’s laugh began before Mycroft ever let his top arm drop, letting the little boy hang upside down in his arms, his legs wrapped tight around him, one arm still holding him in place.

Mycroft pulled Sherlock back to him, his smile unstoppable under the force of Sherlock who was now testing Mycroft’s hold on him, letting his body dangle trustingly in Mycroft’s arms, trying to go back to being upside down.

Today they were having a good day.

“Where is John?”

Sherlock stopped trying to push himself backwards.

“Changing. Nana said we have to look nice.” He scrunched his face, his nose crinkling in distaste in explanation of what he thought about the matter.

Mycroft looked at Sherlock’s clothes, garishly bright orange pants which must have been a gift from someone who suffered from partial blindness or hated them very much topped off with a faded blue button down which complimented his eyes but surrounded his little body like a dress. The buttons were all skewed purposefully by one so that the edge hung down on one side too low and exposed even more of his pale shoulder and collar bone. A keepsake from his old life that the boys seemed inordinately attached to.

“And she approved of your ensemble?”

The scrunched face melted into a toothy smile and wide innocent eyes.

“I hid it.” He answered cheekily with not a little bit of pride.

Mycroft felt the laughter bubble in his chest as he pictured Sherlock hiding terrible clothing around the flat rather than be subjected to normal attire.

“And where did you hide them?”

The look Sherlock graced him with clearly questioned his intelligence. Some things, it seemed, would never change.

It was a good day and Sherlock was happy and they had survived another year so Mycroft pressed a kiss to his brother’s forehead, the feeling of warm skin and soft curls under his lips.

“Alright, keep your secrets.”

The sound of small feet running preluded Johns entrance to the room, little hands pulling only once at the fit collared shirt he had been forced into.

Sherlock was instantly wriggling in desire to be put down and Mycroft watched the two boys collide, not upset at their short separation but grateful to be back in one another’s arms. The room filled with indecipherable words, not muttered, but crisp and perfected and utterly alien.


	23. Chapter 23

"When Mummy was finally permitted to enter the room, her with her careful cheer and Mycroft with his breath frozen in his chest the way it tended to do when he was forced to leave any infinitesimally small detail left to chance instead of pure science, all of the terrible possibilities failed to come to pass.

It was John who saw her first. There was a moment of thought, of slow recognition which caught Sherlock’s attention, and then they were both smiling.

It was tentative. The last time they had seen her had been, at best, rough, and at worst, traumatizing. But she was the voice on the phone which called and listened to all of their stories without a word of reprimand. She was the doting grandmother who sent them beautiful packages from faraway places and never had to tell them to brush their teeth or to stay away from swords.

When she knelt in the doorway waiting to let them choose to come to her or not, her arms open and palms up in a vulnerable posture of peace, the boys looked to him.

It was sobering and uplifting all at once. A life of contradictions.

Where a minute before two children had been laughing John was now edging in front of Sherlock, bodily protecting him, smile fixed firmly on his face but his eyes wary and protective. Hands searched and grasped silently, knuckles turning white. Sherlock was watching her, reading her, analyzing every piece of her and applying it to how it would relate to them. He made no move to stop John, as if he did not notice his own body and did not yet perceive a threat to John.

Sherlock blinked as he finished his mental vivisection. He looked down and found his hand in Johns as if he had not noticed before, slight surprise betraying his deadpan expression and pulled their clasped hands to his chest in an almost unconscious motion.

He turned towards John, noting his tense body and then turned to Mycroft and very suddenly Mycroft felt very much a part of his world.

‘Okay?’

Mycroft nodded to the silent question in fathomless blue eyes and then impossibly, as if they shared a mind, John turned to him. He was his little boy, innocent and young and looking for reassurance but in his eyes, somewhere so deep he himself probably had not the slightest inkling of its existence was the man who would have willing given his life for Sherlock’s.

Mycroft smiled. In gratitude that rushed through his body like a living heat, in reassurance, in terror that he was the last line of defense between these brilliant creatures and the world.

But no one was crying or frozen or lost. Today was a good day.

Sherlock and John did not hesitate further. They were in Mummy’s arms, a continuous litany from John about what they had done that day burbling between the three of them, Sherlock silent but at ease, one arm around his mother, the other still holding part of John against his heart.

 

Mycroft waited for the three to acclimate themselves to one another.

Strange. To see Mummy together with Sherlock. Things may have proved to be tense and awkward between them now that they were physically in one another’s presence, all of the emotion that had been unable to fully articulate itself in the absence of the other erupting in an explosion of half buried thoughts.

Her memories and his nightmares.

But John had integrated himself perfectly, big brown eyes blinking innocently as if he had no idea the calming effect he was having but always speaking at the right moment, always staying in the perfect place so that there was only laughter, only joy even when darkness lingered under the tenuous and imperfect surface.

Even Mrs. Hudson, who had slipped their orange blanket in her absurdly large purse and carried it around like the holy grail, had found it in herself to breath and clutch the floral disaster as if she were not about to mount a rescue mission to the ends of the Earth.

He had expected for them to be, in a way, the way they were before.

Mycroft and Sherlock had always been separated by years, even before all of this.

When Sherlock was making his first embarrassing deductions about house staff dalliances and just beginning to venture off on his own to find the hiding places and brilliant worlds of the young, Mycroft was firmly entrenched in his studies in boarding schools tailored to the very brilliant and the very rich.

Mycroft saw his brother in the week spans of holidays, seeing him grown like a chart from a book, one stage then the next without transition.

Mycroft knew that when he had been young it had been different.

Mummy had sat with him with milky cups of tea and in a soft voice that made him want to crawl into her lap and taught him the words for the world around them in French and Latin. She had taught him about her work which was at that point just beginning to shape into what would be the brilliant work of the next twenty years. She never held back, always making sure he understood, and when it was hard and he grew frustrated she would smile and kiss his nose and make it alright.

Sherlock was one year old when everything changed. It was not that they had grown less important but that her work was at a stage where it could not be stopped. It demanded long hours and a brilliant mind and even though Mycroft had not known the specifics of the work at the time he knew that more people than just him were depending on his Mummy for their lives.

So when his tutors implored Mummy to send him away, send him somewhere where they could keep up with him and provide a challenge for him, he told her it was alright, he told her he wanted to go.

He had had his time with Mummy and now the world needed her. He would go away and study and be brilliant and then one day he could come back and help her.

Sherlock never had that.

Mycroft knew that Father was around more after Mummys work took her away but he was lost in study and to him Father was a figurehead. He was like a Monet hanging on the wall, if you were in the same room you stopped and made all the proper gestures and carried on with your life.

Mycroft almost never saw Sherlock and Mummy together, but when they were Sherlock looked at her as though she were an angel.

Mycroft never saw Sherlock with Father.

But those days were gone. That Sherlock no longer existed.

This was not Mummy’s lost five year old boy looking at her like she could be his savior if only she knew he needed her to be.

This Sherlock belonged to Mycroft and to John.

This Sherlock did not need to be saved.

The three of them had fallen into easy conversation, an update of a story they had obviously begun to tell her on the phone. Mycroft tried to ignore the way she nodded without surprise at their ‘experiments’ which had ended rather disastrously in the kitchen the day before and made a mental note to accidentally send her next shipment of requisition forms in Swahili.

Mycroft tapped his phone, looking at the live image of a very annoyed Harry Watson standing at his front door. He put the phone in his pocket and nodded to Mrs. Hudson who, finally given something to do, disappeared down the hall.

He was not worried that she would make a scene around the boys for being made to wait just as he had not been worried that she would show up. They had both known precisely how late she would arrive.

He had after all given her the excuse she needed to allow herself back in John’s life.

 

Sherlock and John had seen Harry more than once over the past year, short meetings spent in the park or over chocolate milks and mild conversation. They had all carefully shied away from anything that might hold the slightest weight, topical conversations about rain and mud puddles turning into short stories from the boys about random escapades and ruined outfits. So when Harry walked in the door with a frown that dissipated with startling natural ability under the double gaze of the boys it was typical for the shouted hellos and waves and eye rolls to take place.

Mycroft made quick introductions between Harry and Mummy as Sherlock and John stood off to the side watching. They had never seen all of these people together, all these adults who meant something to them gathered in a single room.

Mummy gave no hint that she knew everything there was to know about one Harriet Watson and Harry, who had gone as far as to Google Mycroft, smiled politely as she pretended she was not trying to figure out who exactly her brother had gotten mixed up with in the last moments of his former life.

Mentally Mycroft conceded that this might have been a terrible idea.

Mycroft was trying to find the proper way to get this event begun so it could come to a conclusion when Mrs. Hudson smiled at them all.

Mrs. Hudson has a way making you feel like all of your problems, all of the emotional turmoil raging in you, was suddenly, inexplicably, quite small. As if she were not looking a group of adults with the most complicated interpersonal relationships in the world but as if they were all her grandchildren fussing over a skinned knee or a shared toy and that everything would be okay if they would just sit down and have a nice cup of tea.

Mycroft could almost believe he had lost the capacity to be amazed by people, as happens when you spend your life predicting, knowing what others would likely do. But then he woke up every day and realized that this was in fact, his reality.

Mrs. Hudson clapped her hands together as if to emphasize her decision, her eyes sliding easy across them all without her fondness fading in the least over any individual but brightening noticeably as they settled over the two children. “Lets get these birthday boys some cake shall we?”

 

Birthdays are strange.

Mycroft said it was to celebrate that they were a year older and then asked if they understood what a birthday was. Of course they did, he had just explained it. They just said yes though.

Sherlock says that it is silly to have any one particular day to celebrate because they were only a day older than the day before.

John secretly agreed with Sherlock but Mycroft had looked so excited in his own subdued way that meant he was trying to hide what he felt from them that he decided not to say anything. Besides, Mycroft had said there would be a party.

John had never been to a party, but he had read about them in books.

Nana was excited; she was running around like she had a few too many cups of tea, clutching a giant floral bag to her side. Sherlock saw the bag and his face grew hard but when John asked he just shook his head and seemed to dismiss the thought.

John did not like it when Sherlock kept things from him, but he would tell him if it was important, and if it wasn’t he would probably tell him anyway, when he felt like it.

That morning Nana and Mycroft had been busy with the party so they had chosen their outfits themselves. Nana had laid out clothes for them but she had never had to wear their green collared shirts with the buttons that never actually went through the holes. She obviously did not know how much they itched. John was just being helpful when he pulled out two matching pairs of yellow trousers and Sherlock pulled out the entire contents of a drawer to find the one black shirt they had thrown into the carriage when no one was looking and a soft blue one he knew John favored.

John thought they looked quite pretty.

There was really no call for Nana to flap her arms around like that and talk so fast that it made his head spin until as she led them back to their room.

Sherlock went first, letting the shirt be pulled over his head without a fuss, only squishing his face a little when Nana licked her thumb and cleaned an invisible spot of his cheek. When he was done he was scowling slightly.

John wanted to tell him he still looked quite pretty but figured that it was probably wiser not to say anything.

Blue eyes met his across the room and, of course, Sherlock was not actually going to wear his button down at all. All he needed was a distraction.

John smothered the giggle that the look of mischief on Sherlock’s face always brought out in him. He nodded once when Nana was putting their rumpled clothes back in the drawer, and Sherlock was gone.

John waited while Nana put the clothes away and re-laid the clothes he was supposed to wear out on the bed.

‘Need a hand?’ She asked in the way she always did, without pushing him. John shook his head. ‘I will be right outside if you need me then dearie.’

John quickly and efficiently stripped out of his preferred outfit and into the uncomfortable, stuffy clothes that made him feel like he would immediately accidentally spill something on them.

And he waited.

And waited.

By now Sherlock had probably found whatever he had stashed away.

John let his foot fall heavy onto the floor, let out a small, surprised breath.

‘You alright?’ Came the voice through the door. John waited half a beat.

‘Uh-hu!’

As long as he made a noise every so often Nana would stay just in front of the door, too much quiet and she would find something to do, something possibly closer to Sherlock.

John balled up his other clothes and threw them into the drawer with a satisfyingly loud ‘Thwap!’

‘Almost done dearie?’

Sherlock was probably done by now and he could walk out and Nana could go ahead with her planning and he could go make sure that Sherlock was not scowling anymore…but Mycroft had said it was his birthday.

On your birthday, Mycroft said, calories do not count.

John did not know what calories were but he figured maybe other things did not count either.

So, maybe, just this once, he could be just a little bad.

John pulled his arms through the sleeves of his shirt and rotated it until it was backwards, the ugly buttons running down his back, thick collar almost in his mouth and yelled to Nana.

‘All done!’

John lasted exactly nine seconds before he burst into laughter and tumbled to the floor as she tried to fix his clothing.

Nana knew the second he started laughing what he had done but she did not say anything about it. She fixed his shirt, kissed his hair and smiled before she went off with a backwards call of ‘Just this once!’

Birthdays, John decided, were not that bad.

It was easy to find Sherlock, his laughter made John run faster. Sherlock did not laugh enough and he did not want to miss it.

Sherlock beamed at him when he walked into the room, his mission had been successful. His orange trousers where much better than Johns stiff brown ones.

John did not need a thank you and he was not jealous. He was happy that Sherlock was happy, that warm fuzziness in his chest that meant that everything was ok filling him.

But when Sherlock ran into his arms and placed a slightly squashed cookie into his hands that John had thought had all been eaten the night before, with his blue eyes saying more than his mouth knew how to, John blushed.

Some things, like Sherlock, are better than ‘Thank you’s’. Sometimes all the words go away, and it is okay.


	24. Chapter 24

John held Sherlock’s hand tighter under the table. When the grownups started acting really weird, distracting themselves with cameras and singing John pushed himself closer to Sherlock, close enough that he could feel the heat of his body, the soft press of his arm against his.

That was better.

Closer was better.  
This was not bad. Birthdays were not bad. He liked everyone, he really did. He missed them sometimes when they were not with him. But this…this was strange.

Phone-gran was here and she was safe and warm and her voice was sweet the way it was on the phone but she was different. He had forgotten, or maybe he had never noticed.

She was beautiful.

She had Sherlock’s eyes, blue-blue. But she was like Mycroft too. She tried not to let it show, she was smiling and John could tell that she meant it, but her eyes, Sherlock’s eyes, were sad even when she smiled.

John wanted to make the look go away. He did not want their gran-mere to hurt and maybe…maybe he did not want to see eyes that looked too much like Sherlock so very very sad.

John had thought that maybe all she needed was a cuddle. Maybe she did not have a Sherlock at home to go to when things got too dark and scary. But when they went to her and they held her and John willed all the sadness to go out of her eyes with his hug, holding tight enough that if she were Sherlock she would understand he was trying to give her the world, it only seemed to grow deeper. She smiled of course, and held them, but he could still read it in her eyes. Pain.

She kissed them both and held them tight as they held her, their sweet phone gran-mere.

Maybe one hug just was not enough.

He was lucky to have Sherlock. He pressed just a little closer, until Sherlock had to push back into him or tilt to the side. Blue eyes flashed across his face, reading him, silent, and their interlocking hands fell apart and Sherlock’s warm arm wrapped around his middle, pressing them close. Warm and soft and close and so much better.

Maybe he could find the right words to tell her that if she needed it, she could come over and he would give her a hug, whenever she wanted.

He would even share his Sherlock.

Harry was here too. Her and Nana had been playing with their cameras all day. Saying ‘CHEESE!’ which made no sense, but Sherlock and he chose not to say anything. Sometimes it was better to let the adults play. John would teach them better games later.

Sherlock said it would be impossible to make adults play anything that made any sense and then proceeded to not, not roll his eyes.

Harry was acting a little strange today but that might just be because birthdays are strange. She was tense and edgy, her smile, which normally started brittle and false and ended warm and like she had forgotten that she was supposed to be miserable, remained tight.

When she caught John in her arms and lightly rubbed her knuckles into his hair he thought he might have seen her really smile, but the moment was gone too quickly. Ending in her surprised laugh when Sherlock pulled him out of her grasp and wrapped his arms possessively around John, his glare not quite serious but perhaps a little too honest.

John wrapped his arm around Sherlock, so close now that he could feel the sharp edges of bones beneath his skin, could feel every breath in the chest beneath his open palm and curling fingers. Harry took another photo.

They were still singing and that had a lot to do with how unnerved John was. Mycroft was singing as if he could speak to a certain rhythm and it would be adequate, Harry was a little too loud and very very off key, phone gran was soft and still just a little sad and very beautiful, and Nana had been singing from the other room, her song punctuated by exclamations about candles and walking too fast.

Then Nana walked in with a cake, a cake on fire.

John did not look at Sherlock.

He could not look.

But he could feel him.

Feel the laughter building, feel it shaking him, still silent

John looked at Sherlock just as his friends head turned towards him. Their noses were touching but that did not matter, they could look into each other’s eyes and that was enough, it was too much.

They burst into laughter.

Birthdays are beyond strange.

Nana put the flaming desert in front of them and they finally stopped singing and everyone was staring at them.

John could feel Sherlock thinking. Could he take one of the candles? Would someone stop him? What on Earth were they supposed to do?

John wished he had read a book about birthday parties in particular.

The flames danced in front of them, melting the little wax candles and dripping onto the cake, blobs of pink and blue on white frosting.

It was Nana who came behind them, her voice excited, like something wonderful was about to happen, like this was the moment she had worked for all day. The reason for all the fuss about birthdays. “Make a wish and blow out the candles.”

John eyed the candles dubiously.

A wish?

He wanted to question her.

Could he wish for anything? If he wished for something easy would it come true? Or should he ask for something he desperately wanted even if it seemed almost impossible?

A wish. A birthday wish.

Sherlock held him tighter and John could feel him, more than just his arm or his body, but him.

Sherlock was not wishing for something easy. Sherlock was wishing for the impossible. For something he wanted so much maybe he did not have the words to tell John what it was.

An impossible birthday wish.

John closed his eyes and wished as hard as he could and together the candles fell before them, flickering out one by one in a gust of breath.

 

The presents were something that should have been given a long time before but Mycroft had not thought that the boys were ready for it…that he was ready for it.

The others went first in a blaze of torn wrapping paper and delighted croons from the women at the table.

The first gifts had met with apprehension. The boys looking at the bright paper the way they had the cake, as if they were wondering if everyone in the room had lost their minds and not bothered to inform them. But the paper flew after explanations and coaxing and two small cameras were revealed, bright and childproof but certainly not Sherlock proof.

Sherlock looked at his bright green camera clinically for a moment, wondering perhaps what the insides of it would look like spread across his floor when he looked up at John who had placed himself in Mummys lap, holding out the camera sweetly for an explanation. The look of scientific discovery faded from Sherlock’s face and slowly, as if the actual use of the object had not occurred to him, he brought the camera to his face and meticulously framed John with bright yellow buttons and clicked with a flash, capturing the image for eternity.

As John slipped off Mummy’s lap and with a smile so blinding even Sherlock was powerless to resist, and pulled them together to take a self-portrait, arm outstretched to its fingertips and capturing off center pictures, Harry placed a cheap plastic photo album in his hands.

“I went looking. I do not think there was a single picture of John when he was five.” Her voice was muttered as if she were in a museum and did not want to disturb the people she imagined actually belonged. “But that is okay, I think. These…these will be happy memories.”

Eventually Mummy offered to take a picture and John, after trying valiantly to manage a single decent shot on his own, relented. When she handed the camera back and the image of two little boys wrapped in each other’s arms looked back at them Sherlock’s smile was small and private and pleased as he carefully took Johns hand back into his own.

The boys smiled when they unwrapped their handmade sweaters, warm wool things which displayed the creators overwhelming love far more than it did any sort of innate ability. Sherlock was still not one to save someone’s feelings and John always hesitated just slightly when he lied about something inconsequential but their smiles were real and they laughed as they pulled the baggy, slightly misshapen sweaters over their heads.

Mrs. Hudson crooned and John thanked her sweetly with a kiss before requesting another photo, this time with Sherlock and he pressed together in the comfortable loop of her arms, all three smiling but none looking as if they were posing for a picture, all three looking as if they truly had no better place to be than trapped in that moment.

Mycroft wondered if he should tell her later or if, in the unnerving way she had of understanding what she should not, she already knew. Long weeks had passed since he had been allowed to ‘accidentally overhear’ Sherlock and John speaking about new calluses on familiar hands and the fact that they were maybe, just a little bit, worried.

It had only taken them two days to break him which was, admittedly, unnerving, and had him testing his ability to withstand interrogation later that night when the boys were, hopefully, asleep.

It was with jealous but careful hands that Sherlock had pulled out the hidden knitting and examined the stitches, pointing out the places there were mistakes and places she had re-done entire rows just to fix a single mistake.

Mycroft felt only mildly better when Sherlock demanded that Mycroft steal his Nanas phone and he was able to say and maintain an adamant ‘No’.

This lack of pride in being able to withstand the double effort of Johns heartfelt eyes and Sherlock’s expertly quivering lips may have been because every night after they should have been asleep he would let them come and count the rows she had stitched, let them dissect the effort and love she was pouring into this cloth when she could just go buy something so much more practical.

Mycroft watched the pride with which his boys tugged at the soft material, the way they gazed at the material covering their arms as if it were proof that she loved them, that each stitch and mistake was the physical embodiment of that love and that and even if she said it every day this was proof, this was fact.

No, Mycroft would not need to tell her. Mrs. Hudson had known what they needed before Mycroft had even known there was a need.

Of course they knew they were loved, his two boys who would hopefully never remember a time when they were alone in the world, but how could anyone believe that Sherlock Holmes and John Watson of all the people in the world would not occasionally need proof of fact.

Mummy, of course, had bought them an embarrassingly large child oriented lab set complete with chemicals deemed safe for Sherlockian usage and several instruments which would have made lab techs at Saint Barts envious. Mycroft remembered what Sherlock had managed with his very first child safe lab set and made a mental note to secure at least six new fire extinguishers, possibly seven if he were to air of the side of caution.

They would not notice, or rather, they would not mind if Mycroft did not give them anything. He could hold back his gifts and no one would say a word. He could wait until they were older, wait until not only they were ready but he was ready. But they already were older. Two little humans who could walk and talk and deduce and do so much more if only he would let them.

He had to choose for them.

So he lay the simply wrapped box in front of Sherlock with his heart hammering in his chest.

Sherlock had torn into the other presents as if the paper were nothing but an obstacle to be overcome but now he stared at it as if waiting for it to speak to him. Of course.

Mycroft would have smiled if every nerve in his body was not at a fever pitch of apprehension.

Sherlock had known the contents of every single gift the moment it had been set down in front of him.

The paper came off slowly, as if giving the object one last chance to real itself mentally to him. His blue eyes darted up when the paper box fell away and a case lay beneath. And of course he knew what it was from the shape of it, the lingering impression of memories putting the image into his mind, his small hands reaching out as if what inside was precious and rare and would explode the moment he opened it.

“It was mine when I was your age.” Because he could not give Sherlock his, not as a present to a child, not when even this was too much and the memories could over flow him, not when just being in the same room with it made the loss of the brother he knew ache in his chest as if he had truly lost him.

The case snapped open with a click and it was done, it was over.

Sherlock reunited with his first true love.

He reached out and held the violin as if he had done it a thousand times and never noticed how beautiful it was until this very moment. He brought it to his lap and let his fingers glide over the strings soundlessly, not touching but memorizing, remembering. Holding it the way he would when he was in a mood but not in a mood to play, plucking the strings with his fingers as a case or problem whirled in his mind. Thought turned into sound.

For Sherlock the world ceased to exist as he tucked the violin in to place on his shoulder effortlessly, his blue eyes closed, black lashes fluttering shut as he rested his chin on it. And there was a moment, the span of a heartbeat, where the two Sherlock’s existed simultaneously in one body.

Blue eyes and black curls and sharp cheeks.

The boy and the man too brilliant to keep himself from harm’s way.

They could hear it, all of them, the strings of music from somewhere far off, echoes of memory bleeding into the present.

Their Sherlock.

Mummy could hear the sonatas he had played for her as a child. The ones he had learned alone, hiding in the darkness so complete the music was from rote, music played so softly that sometimes it was only in his mind because real music, real sound, could hurt when it was finished. She heard, as he silently held the violin as if it had been made for him, as if it were a part of him, the music he had learned just because he wanted to make something as beautiful as her.

Mycroft could hear the notes of an older Sherlock, no less broken but more…complete. Sherlock never let him hear him play as an adult. It was private and emotional, it was, in a way, everything they were not. And how could he have borne it? To hear his brother soul laid out, the hear all the things he refused to hear when it had meant so much more.

But that day was different. Mycroft had needed to check something, or rather, someone.

After a year of searching Sherlock had chosen a flat mate, in a day, in a minute, after rejecting everyone Mycroft sent or planted, rejecting everyone he met with a sneer and a sharp remark. And then he had chosen someone, as if it meant nothing, as if it meant everything.

Mycroft could hear the first resonance of music as he came up the stairs, the low sweet sound like painful thought. He waited at the door of the stairs even though Sherlock knew he was there. For some reason, today it did not matter. Today Sherlock did not care who heard him when over a decade before the sound had been lost to history and theory.

And the sweet low brooding sound was joined by another, something at first intangible, niggling at the edge of your consciousness, and then entwining, folding into the song and becoming real.

And it sounded almost, like hope.

Mycroft’s phone vibrated silently and the images from earlier that day at Saint Bart’s appeared once more on the screen.

The man’s background check came back clean, common, pedestrian even, a war hero, but then so many are. He had sent similar to Sherlock and had them dismissed.

In the next room the music grew, it was brilliant and fast and bright in a way he had never hoped his brother could be. Almost…joyful. Like part of the darkness of the world had just begun to lift.

Mycroft climbed down the stairs without interrupting him, there was no need.

John Watson was going to be something special.

Mycroft could hear it now, the music Sherlock would never know he played.

Mycroft wondered for a moment what Sherlock heard, what songs played in his mind when he had never in this life heard a violin? What memories threatened him as he held the instrument carefully to himself and he teetered on the edge of reality? Could he hear the music at all or was it the panic he played away? The pain turned to sound that died in the air, the thoughts that would no longer have meaning for him turned into sound and whispering back at him through the years?

He wondered what John heard. John who was warned that Sherlock would play near him when the rest of the world had been denied that sound. John who had become a new thought, who had changed the music that came from deep within Sherlock’s brilliant mind as if he were the most potent thing in all the universe?

What did he hear as he sat there, five years old, and watched his only friend remember the music of being utterly alone?

Sherlock, lost, adrift in memory and sensation and sound, reached out for the bow, nearly had it in his hand when he stopped, froze as if his heart had been crushed and Sherlock, the boy playing alone in the dark for Mummy, the detective finding his only companion, died again. And the child’s mouth opened in time with his imploring blue eyes, asking Mycroft questions he would never verbalize.

He did not know how to play.

To him, he had never learned at all, never held a violin in his arms.

Mycroft swallowed past the thickness in his throat. He needed to act normal. As if he could not see his brother as he had been, as if he could not still hear him. He needed to make this okay.

To give his brother back his one constant source of something he could almost call happiness. “You will have a private tutor, both of you.” Mycroft smiled at John who did not smile back, brown eyes fixed on Sherlock, unblinking, hands clenched in his little lap as he made the conscious effort not to reach out and touch Sherlock.

“Would you like that?”

Sherlock held the violin a moment longer, reluctant to let it go, as if it might disappear and turn into mist the moment his eyes fell away from it, but John lost his own private battle, his little hand just barely touching the edge of Sherlock’s sleeve as if to see if he were real. Sherlock put the violin back in its case reverently, never taking his eyes off it, and snapped it shut with a deafening click that made all of the music stop, the last strains of music dying in his mind, fading as if it had never been there at all.

And of course, it had not been.

Sherlock shook his hand out of his sleeve, soft material, proof of love, so that his fingers could grasp Johns unhindered, hands twining together. John held him tight and Mycroft wondered if for John, the music had yet to stop.

Sherlock looked at Mycroft and nodded.

This music…this music would be different.

 

Birthdays are weird…but that is okay, weird in a good way. Everyone was there and smiling and holding them and telling them silly things like ‘look how big you have gotten!’ even if they only saw them last week and John knows he did not get any bigger.

Maybe his hair was sticking up?

But it was getting late and everyone was kissing them and holding them and wishing them a happy birthday as they left. Nana had wanted them to go to bed an hour ago but it was their birthday and how could they leave when everyone was still here and phone-gran was really really here and Auntie Harry had just forgotten she was supposed to be miserable?

So John had pouted, and when that did not work Sherlock saved them. Sherlock always saved them.

When Nana was distracted Sherlock clambered onto the table, sitting cross legged next to the almost untouched cake and grabbed a spoon from where it had been left in his bowl of untouched and now melting ice-cream.

When Nana turned back to tell them to say goodbye she stopped, her mouth slightly agape as if she were not quite sure what she was looking at. Sherlock carefully shaved a tiny spoonful off the cake and shoved it into his mouth, grinning at adults who were slowly coming to look at him.

John wanted to kiss him.

He wanted to hug him and tell him all of the words that never wanted to come out of his mouth.

Instead he ran over to the table and climbed up as well, sitting close beside him and taking his free hand and hoping that squeezing it was enough, holding that little part of him was enough to say what he wanted to.

How proud he was.

Sherlock was eating in front of all these people. Something messy and voluntary and he was not shaking or afraid or lost. He was smiling.

Nana would not make them go to bed now. Not if Sherlock was eating. Not if there was a chance that each mouthful could add desperately needed weight to his lithe body.

And so Sherlock ate slowly until night fell, until they all kissed them and hugged them and he never let go of Sherlock because even if he was okay he would still need John. Just in case.

And maybe because John needed it, just a little.

Sherlock put down the spoon and they let themselves be forced into their new birthday pajamas, a gift from cell-phone lady who would sometimes come to talk to Mycroft but always waited until he turned his back to give them a quick knowing smile.

Harry laughed and took a picture as she left but John did not mind.

He liked the pajamas with the feet and the hood, he liked that every inch of him was enveloped in cloth. He liked that their outfits matched, that they were close enough in size that sometime he could take Sherlock’s and Sherlock could have his and it was kind of almost like a hug.

Because that is what you did when you were family.

Gran-mere promised to visit when she could and promised to call even more soon than that. Harry had promised ice-cream because she knew Mycroft would protest, just a little bit, and left with a last ruffling of their hair which Sherlock, crashing from the sugar and leaning heavily on John, begrudgingly allowed. Nana smiled as she put away their new sweaters and checked that they had brushed their teeth and managed all of their buttons and tucked them into bed.

Mycroft was the last one to leave their room, his blue eyes a little tired and his smile just a little too sad as he sat on the edge of their bed. John wondered if he had done something wrong and ruined the birthday party for Mycroft, but when he asked things like that it just made people look more sad, so he stayed quiet.

Mycroft watched them for a minute in the half darkness but it was like he was not seeing them at all, like he was somewhere far away. John shifted closer to Sherlock, hand reaching out for his, the far off look in Mycroft’s eyes made his heart beat faster but Sherlock was squeezing his hand and it was okay, for most people maybe being lost in their minds did not hurt at all.

Mycrofts eyes focused and he came back to them still smiling sadly. He leaned forward and gathered them both into his arms, he was warm the way he always was, his heart strong and constant when John pressed his ear to his chest as it rose against him as if Mycroft were trying to breathe in the smell of them. He moved to let go but John reached out and twisted a hand into his shirt. Mycroft let himself be brought back down for a kiss to be placed lovingly on his cheek.

This time Mycroft’s smile was not sad. He smoothed their hair and pressed a kiss to both of their faces and without a word left them as if something important had been decided.

 

Sherlock was almost asleep the moment they laid down. His blue eyes were half shut and watching John through thick black lashes, moonlight spilled in from the window and John thought he looked an awful lot like an angel.

Sherlock smiled as if he knew exactly what John was thinking and maybe, John thought, he did.

His smile was sweeter than it normally was, heavy with sleep, as if he never woke up in the night gasping for breath, as if he never fell into dark places and got so lost John could not go in after him, as if he had never gotten sick at all. This smile made John want to smile. It made him want to stay up forever because he knew that when he woke up again it would be gone.

But Sherlocks smile did not last even that long, blue eye were on his face as the smile melted into a frown, a pout which made John want to reach out and touch it, to fix it.

John stretched out his hand a little further, fingers brushing Sherlock’s wrist.

They were not lying as close as they normally did. Maybe everyone was right. Maybe they were ‘big boys’ now, maybe big boys were not meant to curl up together in the darkness. Maybe they were supposed to learn to be brave now, to face the night alone.

He did not ask Sherlock just in case he said yes.

John kicked his foot a little further out; let it rest on top of Sherlock’s as if he had not noticed what he had done.

The frown on Sherlock’s face was doing nothing to stop the way his eyes were drooping heavily, but the almost painful pout was slowly giving way to thoughtfulness. He always had the same look on his face when this happened, when there was something he could just not figure out but it was almost there. A mystery he needed to solve.

John could not stand it any longer, being so far away from were Sherlock was, locked out of what he was thinking. He reached out and touched the very edge of Sherlocks mouth, gently pushing it up into an artificial smile.

His efforts got him the hint of a real one and sleepy blue eyes determined not to sleep focused on him.

“What is it?” John asked softly, letting his fingers play with a dark curl now this it was already so close.

Sherlock frowned, the hard earned smile gone as he wrinkled his nose against the words.

“I can’t figure it out.” He looked upset at the vocalized revelation. “I can’t figure out what you wished for.”

John fought back a smile and rolled his eyes just to make Sherlock smirk at him.

“No. Before that.” John let the curl fall from his hand and his arm fell into the space between their pillows. “You were thinking something else.”

Sherlock looked surprised for a moment and then not surprised at all. His smile this time was slightly embarrassed, the words coming out soft and muttled as if maybe he had decided to sleep after all.

“You gave Mycroft a kiss.”

And all of a sudden John realized how stupid he had been. The joy built up in his chest like a laugh that wanted to fill the room but did not need sound.

He tried to stop the smile as he pushed up on his arms and leaned over to give Sherlock a kiss on the cheek, but he knew he felt it. He sunk back into the bed closer to Sherlock, this time sharing his pillow, their limbs touching with every motion, the heat from his body warm and comforting.

The smile was there again, but only for a second. A hand reached out, warm and soft, and touched the cloth over his chest, fingertips measuring his heart beats.

“What did you wish for?”

John smiled and snuggled deeper into the pillow, shaking his head a little in response.

“Nana said we couldn’t tell or it wouldn’t come true.” At some point his eyes had drifted shut but he opened them again to look at the other boy over the few inches of warm air that separated them. The barely there touch of fingertips over his heart turned into a palm pressed flat against him, delicate white fingers fanning out over his heart.

Like a kiss but more, John thought.

Sherlock did not say anything, his face still drawn in the Mystery that was apparently John.

“I need it to come true.” John whispered. He could feel his heart begin to pound as he thought of his wish, his breath coming too fast. He was no longer tired.

Sherlock’s hands came up to his face, fingertips dancing across his cheekbones, holding him as he shifted closer until their foreheads touched.

“Shh-” Sherlocks blue eyes flashed, no longer holding slightest hint of sleep, all of that genius focused on him. His voice was soothing and soft, little more than a breath.

“Breathe with me.”

Fingers caressed his cheeks, across his temples, and he could feel Sherlock’s breath against him and it was simple to match his own to it, the slow in and out that made his heart calm and his mind go blank.

When Johns heart had stopped racing against his ribs and his breath was slow and even and shared utterly with the other boy Sherlock curled closer and pressed a shy, gentle kiss against his lips.

“It doesn’t count if you tell me you know.” Sherlock said with a slight deliberate smile with a voice that made it hard for John to remember why he had ever thought otherwise. “Nana said we couldn’t tell other people.” Sherlock settled back into his space next to John. “We are not other people. We are just…us.” Sherlock smiled again, that rare beautiful one that made him look, perfect. “My secrets are yours.”

John never wanted to sleep. He wanted to stay right here, in this moment, forever. Then he would not need his wish to come true.

“What did you wish for?”

Sherlock looked as if he were contemplating answering but of course he had known the question was coming. When he finally spoke his voice was very small, a whisper in the silent night which betrayed emotion Sherlock never displayed outside of nightmares and daylight memories.

“I wished that I would never lose you.”

Sherlock was afraid.

John snuggled closer, the way they had slept when they were little, the way they slept when they woke up in a cold sweat and a scream on their lips. He wrapped his arm around the other boy under the blankets, hand skimming over his ribs to feel the intake of breath, their faces so close on the pillow that when John shut his eyes he could feel Sherlock’s eyelashes flutter against his skin.

“That was a silly wish.” Their breathing began to slow as sleep wrapped around them, comfort and familiarity pulling them into slumber. The words became heavy with sleep. “I am never going to leave you.”

“And your wish?” Sherlock’s voice asked so softly that John could ignore it if he wanted to, but he could feel the words on his skin as they were spoken, he could feel a small hand reaching out and curling around the back of his neck.

“That you would never be sick again.”


	25. Chapter 25

It was quiet now that he boys were finally asleep and their strange piecemeal family had gone its separate ways, back into their fragmented existences, leaving only the three of them. The unfathomable trio left when everyone else had the leisure, and the anguish, of walking away.

Mycroft wanted to stand up, to go to their room as he had when they were little and spend the night in the chair watching them sleep. To hear their little breaths, to watch them turn, and limbs heavy and warm with sleep find one another in the darkness.

He wanted to know that they rested without nightmares. He wanted that indescribable feeling of sharing a room, nothing more than the air and slow radiating warmth.

He wanted to be with them as he finally killed them.

Today had been a good day. They had been perfect and wonderful and done everything no one should ever expect of them. He watched them stamp down the memories that still gripped their minds and tore at their hearts and bodies. He watched them push back the memories and fears that he had invoked by giving them too many people, too many realities to crash together and then throw on top of it the muted song of a violin that he knew now haunted their sleep.

Tonight might not be haunted with the images of an aborted childhood, but it would be filled with a sound, a song, which no longer existed.

He did not want to watch them thrash as the music pressed down on them and pulled at the memories just beneath the thin veil of the present.

The way Sherlock had looked when he would lock himself away at three in the morning and play until he forgot who he was.

The moment hours later when he would look up and realize that he had not hid himself at all, when he would realize that John had come down and spent the night with him and a cold cup of tea was turned with the handle facing him and John, who had listened for hours, had been lulled to sleep when Sherlock had unconsciously began to play the lullabies his mother had sung him years before.

So Mycroft was alone with the hum of his computer and the tapping of keys, the images of a brother who once was lingering in his mind’s eye, imposing himself over the screen, blotting out the white blue light which softly filled the room.

The cursor blinked on the screen, each blip marking the time which past, each blink marking another moment in which he hesitated.

It was perfect. Everything about this moment was perfect. There was no other path but this, already chosen and laid down before him.

Their birthday, the anniversary of the day they had been reborn in a sea of blood and in the mad chaos of lost lives found themselves in his arms.

For two years Mycroft had lingered on this site, and kept alive that which had already been lost.

The blog of John Watson.

At first it was a means to an end. It was an alibi for when John Watson and Sherlock Holmes would be restored and able to reclaim their lives.

It was simple really, to log on and create an adventure which had taken them away. To leave notes to those left behind, to solve a case or two left in quandaries by D.I. Lestrade and write in Sherlock’s bite softened by Johns words.

And then one adventure led to another and there was always that lingering hope that maybe, for once in his life, he was wrong. Maybe his brother would wake up one day and be the brother he remembered, the brother that he devoted so much of his life to protecting even when Sherlock never knew.

And then he fell in love with them. His boys. His children.

The contrasting cherubs who screamed and laughed and ran and needed him so very much.

But he could not help but miss him even as he held him in his arms.

When a case came up he would still reach for his phone and the beginning of a smile would touch his lips at thought of making Sherlock actually answer his phone and before it ever began to ring he would realize, he would turn it off and something cold and heavy would settle in his chest.

Sherlock would never scoff at another of his cases while secretly rejoicing. He would never glare in a way that was so obviously for show that it was almost like affection.

And he would text someone else to go solve the case, send a team off, and Sherlock would march through the room with his skull smiling garishly in his arms, John trailing behind in a pool of orange and he could not help but love. And it hurt.

But at night, at night Sherlock was not dead or lost or forgotten. He would never not be able to be mad and brilliant and every inch the man Mycroft had spent his adult life watching over.

At night he was all of the things Mycroft remembered of his one sibling. He was sharp and sometimes cruel and always brilliant and liked to pretend he did not, or maybe did not even know that he possessed, a heart. And every step of the way there was John Watson standing beside him.

Every adventure they took in these nighttime wanderings, every trick of fate and genius revelation was told through the eyes of the one person in the world who chose to love Sherlock Holmes.

It was…glorious. It was every idea which, barely formed in his mind had been buried deep into the place that drove him to watch his brother’s life through CCTV instead of knocking on a door or reaching out to him.

To pretend in the darkness when twin breaths comforted his nerves and gave him new reason to live, that he was the man who had staggered through life and war and showed more honor in a cold car park than any man Mycroft had ever seen and still found it in himself to call Sherlock ‘amazing’.

Two years. Two years he had made them travel the world; he had given them life even when he should have ended it. When hope died that they could ever return, that they could ever be these men again, he should have let this foolishness end.

Why spare the feelings of those who still believed in them? Everybody dies. Even those who are so much more than ordinary.

But they deserved a better ending than a simple goodbye. They deserved more than a note from a foreign country informing those who to whom it may concern that the bodies of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson had been discovered cold and abandoned.

They deserved an ending as spectacular as the lives they had led, as the lives they would lead.

And maybe he just wanted to hold on a little longer. Maybe he wanted everyone to see the Sherlock John had seen.

And he had given himself two years. He had built the plot of the end of their lives. He had created such an escalation of events that there could be no ending as perfectly formed as this.

Their birthday. Their death.

And it was time.

And he was not ready to let go.

It was perfect. A story of grand enemies and a secret conspiracy, Sherlock would have loved that. For two years they had drifted through the world bolstered upon the wind of this oncoming evil, always just a few steps away from the brink. A million pieces of a puzzle which on their own seemed like nothing more than the nuances of life but together became something beautiful.

They had been running at the end, not drifting from case to case on invitations and clues but running for their very lives. There could be no more leeway, the enemy had made a stand, unable to carry on with the continued interference of the detective and his companion. Now it was all just a dance to choose the final battlefield.

Posts grew less descript, not dropping clues about where they might be but that, for the moment, they were safe, using the posts to expound upon cases they had just left behind.

John telling the world in that almost painfully honest way of his the way Sherlock had outshone them all. Without reserve and without shame Johns writing was teaching Mycroft what it meant to be the best part of humanity.

The posts carried in them a tinge of dark adrenalin, the taste of small dark places and midnight bus terminals where they had become the things that go bump in the night. Wrapped in words was the feel of flesh pressed close through layers of foreign clothing, of dark curls finally dropping to another man’s shoulder when sleep finally reached up and claimed him for its own.

There was, despite all of the careful deliberate optimism, the feeling of inevitable end. The end of the game when all of the players are weary and there is nothing left to do but break.

For a while they had found refuge somewhere untraceable, somewhere far away from London where the world it seemed could stop and they could breathe.

John spoke of emaciated limbs and hollowed cheeks regaining tentative new life. He spoke of new friends who could never have names but where none the less kind and sweet.

Sherlock posted in his blunt way that his cheeks were not ‘sunken shadows of his former health’ but rather the thinning effect of being on the run and that a certain brother may benefit from such a trail should he be reading, as he so inevitably was.

And just as the words lost their ability to recall wartime without consciously trying to invoke such imagery, when the words stopped meaning a life tentatively scraping an existence on the edge of a blade and deserts and gunfire where not imbedded into every update, the world seemed too perfect.

They were not huddling together in a darkened alley, bodies pressed so close that they were unsure where one person ended and the other began in the damp cold which bit the exposed skin of their downturned faces as voices in a thick and brutal tongue passed by. They were not running from one train to another in a mad dash of looking over their shoulder and never ever being able to trust more than each other.

As simply as a child, as if he had no idea what he was doing, John spoke of the future.

Of more than just the next day, the next minute.

He spoke about gardens.

He imagined packing a lunch and wandering with Sherlock and naming all of the medicinal plants he had never actual seen outside of text books and having Sherlock tell him the brutal uses of each in fantastical crimes.

He wrote about eating under the blue sky with imagined birds keeping watch for them not because they were escaping through the forest or because their bodies had finally given up on them and they had no choice but to lay down. He spoke of a tomorrow he could want to have.

Mycroft imagined warm smiles that were so small they were almost not there at all. He imagined a sun that did not burn their skin but returned to Johns a look of youthful fervor and added the slightest tinge of color to Sherlock’s fine cheeks.

Sherlock solved five new cases by message alone, murders and abductions in the haughty tone that said that everyone should already know the answer, and then said as much in the comment portion of Johns posts.

D.I. Lestrade pretended not to know that Sherlock sounded almost…happy.

Donovan did not show as much restraint.

And then the gardens disappeared with the picnic lunches and the sunshine that never burns.

An unexpected murder in the village. A murder which no one in their microcosm of life would have committed.

Shuttered back into a single room, the smell of roughly hewn wood surrounding them, dark and heady. The stagnation of waiting behind a closed door not knowing what was welling behind it, what evil may await them should they abandon their foothold.

One last post, quick and hurried, the feeling of Sherlock pasing behind him, picking up items and then disregarding them as useless or unnecessary to carry when they would have to travel light. Picking up a book or something else small and cherished that had made the two year journey with them and then putting it back down. Hands on Johns shoulders.

Time to go.

‘Bit of trouble- nothing to worry about.’

And then something telling. Something written as an after thought as he would be standing half out of his chair, Sherlock’s hand warm and tense on his arm.

‘We take care of each other.’

There had been posts by everyone after that. A mix of the worried, intrigued and confused.

The curser blinked at him.

Time to post.

Time to let go.

The clock on the computer silently marched onward.

11:30.

It was perfect in every way. Their perfect ending.

The way they would have wanted to go. The way they would have ended themselves had they not been taken away without a death. The way he would have lost them anyway.

It was everything he should have done every day for the past two years.

But it felt so wrong.

The writing style had changed. The words were awkward and painful where John had been elegant and warm. A password given away at the last moment. A request to a friend, one issued with brown eyes which no one could refuse.

Their escape had been abrupt. The information had flooded inward, someone had given them up. The boy who had died, no more a man than a child, had died instantly, a gun which should not even be found in this country. A room abandoned so quickly that the remnants of life still littered it as if Sherlock might at any moment come back and clam the shirt he left so haphazardly on the floor, the laptop still open from when Johns fingers had last skimmed it.

They left on foot and only a few knew which direction they had taken. They could make a single rendezvous in an hours’ time high in the mountains to be given supplies they could live off as they disappeared once more into the wilds of the world and after that they would be lost.

They had not anticipated that the boy who had been sent to meet them would be crying as if his mind had been torn apart and left nothing but ragged sobs.

Sherlock grabbed the small satchel and turned to leave having everything he wanted in his possession, but the one thing he needed lingered.

John kneeling at the boys side, coaxing the story of the sister, of the little girl who had time and again run to John with a flower or some small gift of affection. A firefight, a quick dirty affair which left several injured, most dying, as the shooter, a mercenary more likely than their main quandary, disappeared into the forest.

John had not even seen it as a choice.

He would go back, it would be safe enough if the boy led the way through the back alleys and hid in the long shadows of the ending day. He would meet Sherlock with more supplies, with fresh information. He could gather the medical supplies they would need to survive further into the wildness.

Sherlock saw the choice, knew every outcome as if it were inevitable truths laid out before him, but he did not hesitate. He did not consider for a single moment the choice not taken.

If Sherlock held him too tight as they said their silent goodbye, if his eyes lingered just a moment too long as if memorizing what was already emblazed in his memory John contributed it to the much more obvious, the idea that it might be John who was walking to his death.

They parted without a word and John did not mind. He knew the way Sherlock worked and he would not die and leave him. He would see him again and they would travel to the end of the world together.

John would not know his mistake until a friend met them on the path, the man who had known Sherlock long ago and taken them in as his own kin when they had shown up at his door ragged and half alive.

There had been no fight, no one had died because of them, no lives had been put into danger because of their existence in this place.

Another traitor had been outed in the village since they left, since the boy had been intercepted and told to run ahead with a package and told of the massacre.

John would never see the final battle.

He would not see Sherlock make the lonely journey up the face of the waterfall to where a dark figure stood waiting for him as if guarding the gates of hell and all of eternity lay before him. A dark lined face that spoke of London air as thick as water, a body that seemed so out of place against the soft green beauty of the world in which they stood that it seemed as if he had come to be here by magic rather than the way Sherlock had come with his dirty shirt and torn trousers, dirt smudging his pale cheek.

He would never hear the words the two enemies exchanged. He would never really understand what it had meant that he was not there to witness the exchange nor to take part in the inevitable outcome that lay before them. He would never know that this moment, this chosen ending, was for him.

One sacrifice in a life of unrelenting self-service.

One life gambled to set another free.

What John would know was that the only sound in his world was the efficient intake of his own breath and the pounding of his blood through his heart like the sound of a war drum, like the sound of young men falling to the ground in a spray of bullets and delusions of grandeur.

He knew that time was running too fast.

Knew that he was the last player in a game in which no one could come out alive and everyone but him could see the finale before they had ever begun to play.

He would feel the panic as he approached the falls and he sound of crashing water filled the world, the last few steps looming as a barricade between what could be and was, time frozen beyond the final veil even as his lungs seared in pain and his heart pounded and his hands and feet grappled for desperate purchase on the final incline.

The rocks would loom before him treacherous and damp and smelling of the dark things rotting in the forest and the unending spray of water and he would not take a moment to pause for fear or wait for backup which had followed in his wake.

It was too silent.

Without the dark rumbling mutter of a voice snarling that the end had come.

Without the achingly familiar sound of self-assured brilliance.

From here the wording would change. The sentences abrupt and the words haggard.

As if each sentence, each moment of recollection was a physical pain. A staggered step, a torn breath.

If this were a hundred years ago, if this was a final note goodbye instead of an electronic update, if messages still held the physical manifestation of the sender, the handwriting would be in dark blotchy ink, black orbs dropped to the paper and then smudged by a careless or unseeing hand, the writing would be harsh and slanted, as if each pen stroke was not a simple line but a barb cut into flesh. If this were a letter sent back in a horse drawn carriage in a more elegant time, tear stained watermarks would smudge the words here, warning before the words were ever read the truth of their ending.

John is almost falling as he reaches the top, as the waterfall opens before him in all of its sick grandeur.

And no one is there.

Footprints sunk into the earth, a battle at the uppermost ledge, hundreds of meters in the air where the water is like a fine mist you breathe into yourself.

He can see it though there is no one there.

Hands twisting into black fabric, fingers clutching and pulling. Two dark figures against a world of green.

The scrape of a shoe on the edge of the ledge.

A moment of weightlessness. Of neither falling nor standing.

Sherlock.

And though he will never hear the gasp as white hands reach out not to pull himself back but to tangle and entwine he can see them.

Sherlock’s sharp blue eyes.

The smile on his lips as he falls back like an angel about to take flight.

The smile that meant yes, of course he had known this was coming.

The smile that meant that their quandary of the past two years had finally made a mistake.

He had underestimated Sherlock’s heart.

It doesn’t stop John from screaming.

From the name tearing itself from his body.

He falls to his knees on the wet earth, leaning dangerously over the ledge into nothingness, screaming at the top of his lungs although the wet heat of loss has already begun to seep into his voice.

And there is the roar of water.

And the echo of his own voice like a ghost reaching back for him.

‘SHERLOCK!’

He screams again and waits as if there is a chance that the first time he had not heard, he leans further into the abyss as if waiting for a response.

A hand tangles into his coat and pulls him back from the edge and John tumbles into the wet dirt, looking up with pleading eyes at the man who had taken them in and treated them like family.

He lets himself be dragged away from the cliffs edge, away from the endless abyss with its roaring white water.

Footsteps in the dark soil leading up to the battle, evenly spaced, calm and unhurried.

John follows the echo of Sherlock back through time.

Footsteps lead to an alcove, a small outcropping of stones and the tangle of vines hearty enough to survive in the extreme habitats of the Earth. And it is beautiful. The falls stretch out before him impossibly huge, green and black and white and so far from the streets of London, so far from the rooms in which they had shared a life.

A coat carefully folded and placed, just for him.

He takes the coat into his arms without knowing why. Just to hold it. To feel the familiar cloth in his hands and want it to still be warm.

It is cold and damp and John can feel it, this slow moving horror rising within him.

But he does not cry.

He is still waiting for a voice to echo back to him. He just has to wait. Just has to believe in Sherlock.

And then he feels it wrapped in layers of wool in his arms. Dry and safe, a paper folded into the coat.

He sits down on the rocks where Sherlock had been only minutes ago knowing that John would come for him, knowing that John would follow.

He opened it with a flash of hope. A single perfect moment as the water crashed and rose in a mist over the land and maybe, beneath its roar Sherlock cried out for him to come.

A page written in familiar dark script, like living brilliance.

And in the too honest mirror of his dark brown eyes hope rose, and flickered, and in a breath which hitched and caught in his chest, in the missed beat of a heart, it died.

There was a moment silence, like a moment of weightlessness, like standing on the edge of a precipice with an indulgent smile, knowing you were about to fall.

And the dry beautiful paper, the words written so carefully, so beautifully, smudged beneath the fall of burning, wet, tears.

The silence did not end peacefully, it was broken in a jagged cry of pure unendurable anguish. Angels might fall so beautifully but humans were doomed to earth bound torments.

John buried his face against the cold coat and cried out a name in a sob which had no reply, the sound smothered and died against soft wool.

Tears falling into dark wet cloth as if they never existed.

The paper. The note goodbye, crumpled and crushed against a throbbing chest.

And time passed and water fell and light disappeared until all that remained was the glistening twilight lighting the mist.

When a hand fell on Johns shoulder and a soft voice told him it was time to go home there were no tears on his face and if any remained imbedded in the coat in was too dark to betray their existence.

His movements were careful and slow as if the passage of the last hour had taken the toll of a lifetime on his body and each motion had become the work of the utmost difficultly and pain.

He did not say a word as he stripped off his own coat and lay it on the ground, folded in the unconscious moves of a wartime soldier, slipping his arms into black wool which engulfed him like a blanket. He never put down the note, never unclenched his fingers from around whatever truths it held.

In a voice without emotion John explained the events which had happened to the friend who stood still with tears in his eyes. He explained that he would not go back, that it would not be safe for the village.

He gave him the password and asked him to write to the others, to tell them what happened. They deserved that much at least. He pulled the coat tighter, fingers curling over the edges of the long sleeves.

He did not ask what the note contained and John did not offer.

He put a hand on Johns shoulder, on wool that still looked like Sherlock, and promised. But he would not let John go alone, not tonight, not like this.

John agreed easily, too broken to argue, a nod his only consent.

But brown eyes flickered back to where footprints still betrayed the final dance, to where names echo and return and water fills the air.

Just a moment.

One last look.

One last goodbye.

John started the climb back up, following the ghost of Sherlock’s footprints, careful never to trod on them but always next to them as if they had walked this path side by side if only hours apart. Over green moss and grey rocks and nothing that looked like home except warm black wool.

He disappeared in and out of the mist, the dying light playing across the water, lighting rainbows in the air.

John Watson stood on the highest precipice, staring into the churning water hundreds of meters below, leaning over as if he could defy gravity, as if nothing could touch him now.

The man looked away. It seemed too private. Like watching the vivisection of a soul.

And then without a noise, without a breath or a cry, John Watson fell.

As if gravity had decided to wrap itself around him and reclaim him.

Nothing but a black figure falling against white water and maybe, maybe a smile that meant yes, of course I knew this was coming.

And the words would sputter and stop.

Electronic messages devoid of tear stains and smudged ink.

The perfect ending to an imperfect life.

Time to let go.

To bury the brother he had failed, two years too late.

To abandon the man who had shown him through writing what it meant to be a good man instead of just a great one.

To kill them once and for all.

The clock struck five in the morning in the silent way it does only to tell you that somehow the last five hours of your life had disappeared without you seeming to notice.

The curser still blinked at him but it feels different this time.

The story has changed.

It is less perfect.

Not the ending they deserve, but the ending they all need.

He clicks enter before he can change his mind. He can go back and erase it of course, but he won’t.

Soon the sun will come up and two little boys will wake up and the world will start all over again. Another year, 365 days to make everything go right this time around or at very least, to make it better.

Scotland Yard will wake up and check Sherlock’s stagnant website and Johns blog the way they do every day even if they deny it to one another. Each one will sit in his or her home with a cup of tea or coffee with the numbness of sleep still making their limbs heavy and their minds slow, and they will read the last blog of John Watson.

The Final Problem.

It was close, the story begins as a warning, the whole episode at Reichenbach.

The writing is different this time, slightly perfunctory and very nearly preoccupied in lieu of John’s elaborate romantic writing, but it is in perfect English.

It is the story of a final battle between opposing sides when the option to run is no longer of any value.

The talk between parties is ignored, it is of no value, and in any case the finer points would be lost on a reader of even moderate intellect.

It is only necessary to understand that this is no longer a battle in the theoretical or of conspiracies and networks, this was a battle which had devolved into its most basic and inevitable form.

Two bodies locked in a conflict, hand to hand combat miles from civilization where no one else could be caught as collateral damage. A spot chosen as much for its desolation as for the dramatics of meeting at cliff face edge of a waterfall.

The two opponents were evenly matched in intellect and brute strength and their companions had been diverted and left behind. The end would come either at the first mistake or when one or the other decided to end it at the cost of both of their lives.

It was the other man who made the final gesture forsaking any other ending.

He clawed his hands into Sherlock’s coat and with a twisted smirk let himself fall.

It was impossible to hold them both up, to keep them on the slippery unforgiving ground at the edge of the precipice. His shoe scrapped into the rocks and wet dirt at the edge in a last hopeless bid to remain standing but the ground gave way and the other man was already falling, weightless and laughing.

And so Sherlock Holmes fell.

A split second of peering into to abyss, of having nothing beneath him but air and water and the sound of crashing water coming up to meet him even as his enemy fell away to find a solitary death.

But firm hands curled into his clothing, wrenching him back. He slipped anyway, already falling, already building momentum, but John was there holding onto his hands as he fell and caught. John holding him as he hung above nothing.

And John was strong, every inch the military man, the loyal companion, and he was almost smiling, adrenalin and relief flooding him as they were reunited.

But the ground was wet and the rocks beneath them were falling away.

If Sherlock held on they would both fall in a torrent of dirt and stone.

John would never let go, would never let him slip through his fingers.

But Sherlock could save them. There was a ledge unseen from up top, little more than a few stones gripping the side of the cliff face, stones he could grasp onto, stones which would inevitably incur injury by were unlikely to bring death.

And so he smiled.

There was no time for words nor the breath to waste on it, but John would understand.

And so he fell.

Above them a fool of a man, the witless partner to the fallen enemy, had witnessed what he no doubt interpreted as the death of his master and that of Sherlock Holmes and no one remained to blame except the one man left standing on the edge of the world. Rage painted his vision red, emotion clouding an already inferior mind.

The gunshot echoed through the cavernous waterfall as if the bullet was tearing apart the very air.

John Watson fell to his knees as the bullet tore through his upper chest, piercing just above his heart.

A lesser man would have fallen, would have screamed and lost his mind in agony.

John fell into the dirt as it darkened with his blood, his chest and face splashed with crimson.

But John had never been ordinary.

If he died there would be no one to stop the shooter from doing the same to Sherlock when he reached the top.

The shooter had exposed himself from his hiding place, foolishly believing that he was safe. He never even saw the glint of the gun.

Johns hands did not shake at all.

It only took Sherlock the matter of moments to scale the cliff and tear off his soiled leather gloves. Sherlock pressed his white hands against the wound, steaming the blood flow, refusing to let John slip through his fingers.

And that was it.

Covered in blood and bruised and feeling the steady beat of a heart which had nearly stopped beneath his hands, he was done.

They were done.

Sherlock had nearly lost John and that was unacceptable.

The words of the blogger seemed to run away with him for a moment, caught up in the action now written on the page, on the emotions and repercussions lingering in those thoughts.

As if they were too painful to linger on, the darkest moments of the story were flitted past quickly and efficiently.

If the two shared any words at the end of their trial, soaked in blood and gasping for breath they would remain ensconced in mystery, locked in the minds of those who survived them.

The author turned towards the present and the future.

John was alright. He would be alright. He was to get out of surgery within the hour and the prognosis was good, considering how mortal the wound had the potential to be.

He would retain intact mental function despite the extensive blood loss and regain most of the range of motion in his shoulder and arm.

John Watson is too strong to die.

The writing felt as if it were leaving most of the words unspoken, that minutes or perhaps hours had been spent on the last line, deleting and adding adjectives to describe John Watson and finally ‘strong’ was the meager compromise which had been while perhaps too unintentionally revealing, honest.

John would survive, but he would need to rehabilitated.

They were going away.

Somewhere John could recover from his wounds without the slightest possibility of death. Things had escalated rather badly in the last two years and a return to London would inevitably mean a return to established enemies and dangerous work patters.

They were going somewhere where no one had ever heard of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, somewhere where John could recover and maybe once he was suitably fit they would continue as they had.

However, until further notice Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were effectively retired.

This blog would no longer be updated. This post existing for the soul purpose of assuring everyone who still took note of their lives that they were still alive somewhere out in the world.

John would be out of surgery soon and he had every intention of being there no matter what the doctors said about him being unconscious.

John would know he was there.

Any efforts made to find them would prove entirely fruitless. Sherlock had taken steps to make sure that they would never be found and anyone who journeyed to Reichenbach Falls would find nothing but a serene looking waterfall.

So do not bother trying. Lestrade. Mycroft.

Of course he had yet to inform John of their plans for immediate retirement and subsequent settling down but John would more than likely be amiable to such an idea, or it would at least grow on him.

He remembered John saying something about watching the sun rise over the ocean and keeping bees.

So until the end of their retirement or for the duration of their lives this was their digital farewell.

There would be no need to worry about them.

They would take care of each other.

The curser blinked at the very end of the post, marking time which seemed very suddenly, to have not yet started at all.

SH

A handful of hours later, when London was waking and Scotland Yard was just sitting down with their cups of coffee and tea, bleary eyed and swathed in bathrobes to read the blog of a man who had once existed, two little boys invaded the silence of Mycroft’s contemplative melancholy. Running into the room arm in arm, eyes twinkling with the excitement of yet undiscovered things, and dressed as lunatics, Mycroft gathered them into his arms and held them as if he would never let them go.


	26. Chapter 26

Mrs. Hudson walked through the security clearance checkpoints at the front door, nodded at both the hidden camera set into the inconspicuous looking plant and the plain clothes guard pretending rather poorly to be immersed in what appeared to be yesterday’s obituaries. The heavy metal doors thundered closed behind her, clacking the way a bank vault might close when the security precautions had been triggered. The final door into the rooms was simple, a dark cherry red wood and for ascetics more than actual service as a door. She closed it behind her, clicking the simple push lock with the press of a finger, the simple mechanical lock feeling like the protection of a sheet of paper in comparison to its counterparts. Mycroft never locked this door, always made strange appraising faces at her when he went to exit and found it locked but, she supposed, if the mad geniuses of the world were spending their lives in elaborate complications maybe it would be the overly simple which they overlooked. After all, every little bit helps.

The hallway was empty but that was far from unusual. Tiny coats and one long black overcoat hung on the coat rack as a greeting, an unusual display of domestics in an otherwise ornate and pristine chamber. There was a sound here which could not be heard from the outside, probably owed to bomb shelter style walls and anti-chemical warfare air filtration systems built into the elegant rooms, hidden by tapestries and paintings. It was a soft drifting sound, low strains of music that made her think of old black and white films where romance was always true love but never seemed to end happily, music that was, if music can carry human emotion, slightly sad.

She followed the sound, silencing the click of her own heels against the hard wood floor. The room opened up before her and the music spilled out, filling the chamber and echoing into to where she had just come.

John was curled up on the couch alone, his legs tucked up against his chest, his chin resting on his knees, so small and quiet that she might have missed him altogether had she not known where to look. He was listening, but more than that, he was watching, brown eyes wide and almost unblinking. He was supposed to be practicing, rooms away a grand piano sat untouched, sheet music read only for as long as his tutor sat with him but he never lingered.

Sherlock was playing for him. She could always tell when Sherlock played for himself, when he was so lost in his own mind that he did not hear John sneaking in, when the music was not soft and beautiful but sometimes harsh and difficult and confoundingly beautiful.

Sherlock’s eyes were closed, his black curls falling into against his cheeks, his pale face tucked lovingly against the violin. She could see the man he had been in these moments, all pale and underfed and maddeningly brilliant, but he remained her little boy, the five year old who could have the ear of the world if he wanted it.

Mrs. Hudson settled into her usual chair, the one that looked harsh and unwelcoming as if it belonged in a museum or a castle tucked behind red velvet rope, but enveloped you in softness and comfort as if it had been waiting for your arrival. Neither boy made any move to acknowledge her but she did not mind, she knew that their silent acquiescence only meant that she was theirs.

She wanted to take the camera from her bag and take a picture of them, to capture how they looked together like this. John listening as if he would be happy to stay silent forever, brown eyes so wide and innocent, more like a painting than a child and Sherlock lost not in his own darkness but in the music that to him, meant John. She did not bother taking the picture, moments like these were impossible to capture, so fragile it was like a flicker of light, almost invisible, something tangible between them that spread to those around them.

She settled in to wait. Her boys would not need her until long after the music faded, until John unfolded himself from the couch and Sherlock remembered that there was more to himself than a bow and a violin, that not all thoughts could be made into music.

Quietly she shifted through her bag, clutching her wallet in one hand as if it were something solid and heavy, as if it were a weapon or a stone tablet, something finite and powerful. The camera she borrowed from Sherlock the day before dangled from the wrist of her free hand, already holding within its mechanical contents the picture which she wanted to make real.

It was nothing special, the image she had in mind. It did not demonstrate that these boys had once been men, it did not show genius or ludicrous bravery or silent secret tongues. It was so simple that Mycroft would have to say yes, so perfectly pedestrian that he could harbor no complaints.

These boys, her boys, were the third generation of children she had hand in raising. She was there when they would barely speak a word, she knew what it felt like to sit outside their door and listen to them scream and know that nothing she could do would help them, she knew what it felt like to have them look at her as if she was the most perfect woman who had ever lived and all she wanted in return was a picture.

Two generations of her children existed in her wallet in faded sepia. Two small faces she had loved more than herself peering out through the years at her. Her boys, her John and Sherlock deserved to be there as much as she deserved to have them. When she held them in her arms and they let her, they belonged to each other.

Things were changing, they were changing. She knew that life moved fast, that if you spend too long waiting, planning for the next moment, it will pass you by as if you were never there at all. Life was all of those little moments that simply slip past. It was when John climbed up on her lap just to be held in her arms, it was when Sherlock insisted with overly large blue eyes that pants could be worn in place of a shirt. But things were changing.

Soon they would shy away from her hugs under the gazes of their peers, soon they would no longer need her to help them tie their shoes even just because they wanted her attention.

More had changed since their birthday than just the onset of music into their lives.

Mycroft had been very busy for about three days, texting and ordering people about in foreign languages in a flawless accent that still managed to sound so incredibly British, before he came home with two miniature outfits for some form of martial arts that she had not even tried to pronounce the name of. He explained that these two, of all of the people in the world, should know how to defend themselves. He acted as if it were something paltry, as if he were not desperately worried that they would need these skills, as if he were not the most worrisome parent in the world with the most reason to be so, and had done nothing more than signed them up for a class downtown.

Mrs. Hudson did not say anything about the way all of the equipment was expensive looking and out-of-the-box new. She simply let her two boys run into the throng of older children who enveloped them with warm smiles and confusing if welcoming Korean, their heads reaching the level of the other student’s black belts. She always waited outside or ran off to do some errands when they had class so as not to make them nervous. She never worried about their safety when she left the building and plunged into the grey streets of their city. She doubted there was another group in all of London, or Korea for that matter, that knew more ways to kill before you realized you were in danger.

Her boys always came back from class smiling and laughing. She had worried at first that they would be coddled, after all John was so sweet and Sherlock always just a little too thin, but she should not have worried. They would reenact class in the middle of the living room, their bodies slamming into the ground in failed attempts with laughter that would echo through the room or success and even more laughter. They would come back to her with the injuries of little boys roughhousing, a scrapped knee and bruises so light they were nothing but a tint of yellow on pale skin. On Sherlock she would see the barely there bruises on his arms or knee and she would kiss them and he would look at her indulgingly. He did not need her to kiss them of course, they may treat him as if he were made of papier-mâché and fine spun glass but Sherlock himself would be hard pressed to notice if his arm had fallen straight off until he had reason to use it.

She never saw a bruise on John.

Not a scratch or a bump or the yellow indentation of fingers gripping just a little too hard.

John was like her Ben had been in this way, the quite boy who still peered out at her through the years in the faded yellow of a photograph with a smile that was never really there.

But it was alright, even when it was not.

She knew how to care for him.

She understood what it meant when John looked at the clothes that she had pulled out for him and quietly, without words, without more than the stiffening of his body, panicked. She knew without having to touch him that his skin would be hot to the touch, that his heart would be pounding so hard that he was afraid that it might jump from his throat.

She remembered the way to sweep away the clothes and tut at herself saying of course they were dirty, of course it was too cold outside, and hadn’t he worn blue just yesterday?

She understood the way it was okay to gently brush the hair from his face to call attention back to the world as she made a mental note not to set out shorts for John until Sherlock’s matching bruises had faded from his skin.

She knew the way they could all pretend that nothing was wrong.

John would smile, her brave little boy, and he would not need help changing anyway and even if he did Sherlock was just a step away, blue eyes evaluating, watching, hands always just short of reaching out to touch.

In some ways it was easier now with John than it had been with her Ben, because most of the time in at least some of the ways, nothing was wrong.

She was not the woman-child without any idea of how the world worked with the husband with a golden smile and the baby boy who was always just a little too quiet.

Things were different then, she was nineteen and in love and love does funny things to you. You make up excuses for people, you don’t see flaws where you should. But then again maybe that is not love at all.

John is still sitting enraptured on the couch, breathing so softly that he might be consciously slowing it so that he would never miss a note of music, staring at Sherlock as if his world began and ended with him.

Maybe love was acknowledging the flaws and loving anyway. If she had had the knowledge of these five year old boys maybe her life would have been very different. But she had not, and maybe it would have been the same anyway.

Things had been different then. She never imagined getting a divorce, of course she contemplated just leaving but it was never a real idea, never more than a fleeting thought when she watched her child flinch or when she had to learn to walk without a limp so that no one would ask. But where would she have gone? What would they do? Things were bad, but like he told her every day, things could always be worse.

Where would they end up without him?

How would they survive without him?

She did what she could to protect him, her brave little Benedict, but she was not always strong enough, not always quick enough.

They existed together in a world all their own, her and her Ben and it was all so normal.

They did not know anything else.

So she dressed him for school in his long sleeves and long pants and on the long hot afternoons of the summer when tempers were short and hands heavy she would send him away to play and sometimes he would go, and sometimes, sometimes he would not leave her.

She had been thinking about him a lot of late, the child he had been and the man he had become because of it.

She had seen her Ben in John the first time they ever met. He hid it better of course, John had always been the strongest person she had ever met, but she could not help but love him just a little bit for it.

When Sherlock, the brilliant mad genius who had been so kind to her through the worst events of her life, those awful endless black days in Florida, came to her for a flat she was glad to have him. A distraction, someone to fill her old building with life again, with bumps and footsteps and explosions to drown out the silence where her life had once existed and just a little, to have someone to care for. But she had worried endlessly.

Sherlock was never meant to be alone.

And then John Watson had walked into their lives.

He looked nothing like Ben had looked when he hugged her for what would be the very last time and told her he was moving to Florida, that he could not stay in London, that London was no place to raise his baby girl while his father still lived.

Not his hair or his face or his smile or his laughter.

But they had that same look in their eyes.

Endless.

And so she loved him. Both of them. And she could worry about Sherlock just a little bit less.

Or at least she had worried about Sherlock less. That feeling did not cross over to when he suddenly needed her to feed him and stop him from blowing up parts of the kitchen.

The door clicked softly as Mycroft walked into the room, she clutched her wallet tighter but neither of them spoke. Sherlock was still playing.

She could tell that he wanted to spend time with them before he had to give them up for the afternoon Harry Watson took them every week.

Another change there. Harry was a sweet girl if a little out of sorts with herself. Not as strong as John, different of course, but she could not be blamed for that. Mrs. Hudson was proud of what Mycroft had done for her; a year ago she would have run from the idea of spending time alone with her brother for the span of minutes, as if her presence alone could ruin him and now she took them out every week for what she called ‘normal children’ time.

Now the boys called her Auntie Harry.

There were conditions of course. She had to be clean, no alcohol for three days prior to taking them and she took this for what it was without comment. She had to tell Mycroft where they were going in advance so that he could send plain clothes guards and depending on the location, send additional police into the area.

She was a good girl.

Harry took them to parks and movies, she held their hands and rolled her eyes at them and taught them to make silly faces and eat food with no nutritional value.

Mrs. Hudson had been fond of her in the way she was fond of everyone but then she had done something that would endear herself to the older woman forever.

Mrs. Hudson had been tidying when her phone buzzed in her pocket; it had been on vibrate ever since Sherlock had changed her ringtone to an array of rude sounds and then set the language to some form of Arabic. A picture came up on the screen with three words typed in exuberant caps.

‘FOR THE WIN!’

A picture of Sherlock meticulously licking at an oversized ice-cream cone, face scrunched in concentration so that not a single drop would touch his fingers.

It had taken only two visits for Harry to ask in her blunt way if they were feeding Sherlock, a look of agitation on her face betraying her actual concern.

It took three weeks for her to figure out that the junk food of choice was ice-cream. Cotton candy had been fed to the wind, cupcakes had been crushed into new shapes and candy generally remained in its wrappers while the boys tried to sound out the ingredients listed on the back. Ice-cream however held some appeal, at least a few bites disappearing from Sherlock’s dish voluntarily and more than a few bites of Johns ice-cream being offered to him and taken under the carefully pleading wide brown eyes.

And now this.

Sherlock came home that afternoon bouncing off the walls with sugar, taking Johns hand in his and disappearing into their room to create chaos as Harry laughed in their living room.

She smiled as she described it, the way he had been so focused on not letting it fall or drip that he had actually seemed surprised when it was gone, looking at his empty fingers with a raised eyebrow.

They had always come back from their trips with Harry after that hyper but no one told her to stop.

Mycroft added five different flavors of ice-cream to their grocery list.

The music faded, the last notes disappearing, fading into time and memory. They all looked up, blinking as if they had been asleep and Sherlock put away the violin before looking up at them, as if until the moment the case shut it away it had him under its spell.

John jumped up from the couch, smiling as if he had never been so happy in his life and kissed Sherlock, pulling the other boy into his arms.

Mycroft saw that he did not have a chance of catching their attention until they had exchanged whatever endless conversations and secrets they carried and Mrs. Hudson stood, thinking again of the pictures in her wallet, the small faces peering out at her, of the picture in the camera she wanted more than anything.

The picture that was not of their genius or their skill or their madness, but a picture that was nothing less than love.


	27. Chapter 27

Auntie Harry took them to the movies sometimes and it was fun. The theaters were cool and dark but no one was ever scared and there were a million seats all over the place and when you sat in one your feet would dangle over the edge. And sometimes if it was too cold then they would both crawl into the seat next to Auntie Harry together and everywhere their skin touched was warm and their limbs would tangle and there were people all around them whispering and they would sit there and make up stories about how their lives must be.

Well, at least John made up stories, Sherlock insisted that his were always true. John thought that the man two rows down with the scratch on his arm was probably not actually a lion tamer though. Maybe a baby lion tamer.

Harry would buy them treats too. Popcorn was bad because it got on your fingers and stayed there, slick and yellow, but candies were good. They came in all sorts of colours and flavors, sticks and circles and Nana would hate all of them which made it even more fun. Sometimes they even ate some of them. They sounded like rain as they scattered to the floor.

John had told Nana and Mycroft about the movies once and Nana asked how the movie was. John did not really remember, it had been bright and colorful and the screen was amazingly tall but the characters were silly and it was much more entertaining to whisper with Sherlock than watch what all of the other children seemed so amused by.

John did not get it but he had Sherlock so he did not really mind being different. They could be different together.

Mycroft had started playing with his phone, texting Harry. John knew because sometimes Sherlock would steal his phone and they would text people with it, importing sounding stuff, just like Mycroft.

‘You sunk my battleship!’

‘Foothold situation!’

Mycroft had almost panicked the first time and sent a flurry of texts in their wake, when he had calmed down again he said they were lucky they had contacted people without many English translators. The thought seemed to put him at ease but Mycroft did not know that they had taken some of his books and were learning the translations for next time.

Whenever they got his phone they sent texts to Harry telling her to buy them swords or flashlights or spelunking gear but she never did, but still, that was the chime Mycroft’s phone made when she texted.

After Harry sent him the lists of movies they had watched he promised them that he would show them what movies were supposed to be like.

 

It was going to be a busy day, a half a dozen countries were waiting on him for responses to what they had each individually labeled an ‘immediate crisis’ and one so far as to melodramatically add ‘impending doom’.

He knew the type of day, the kind where he would not notice when a meal slipped him by and he would look out the window, finally done staring at the digitalized screen of his phone or his laptop to find that the world had gone dark around him and that the two boys he had intended to spend the day with where already long ago asleep, the memory of a sleepy goodnight murmured at his doorway or a quick perfunctory hug lingering in his memory like a waking dream.

Mycroft would tell himself as he looked into their darkened room that they were no worse for it, that they had other people in their lives who loved them. He had made sure of that. He told himself that another day without him in their lives was hardly noticeable. He told himself that normal parents did it all of the time.

And then they would shift in their sleep and he could see a peaceful face years younger in rest than in wakefulness, a hand thrown over a hip or encircling a chest and holding on as if they would never let go…and it was no longer a question of who needed whom.

He could hear them breath softly into the darkness, see their small bodies shrouded under blankets, the faces which were never this serene in the day. The explosions and laughter which followed them in daylight were all but gone and he missed them unbearably.

It was going to be another one of those days.

He let them slide past him that morning without more than a ruffle of their hair.

He had meant to tell them to be brave and be careful and to tell them how proud he was of them as they stood there in their martial arts outfits waiting to leave.

He had meant to draw them into his arms and hold them close and whisper that he loved them very much as small hearts beat against him and smaller lips pressed kisses to his cheeks.

But his people in Japan had just sent him their nuclear crisis plan, and the royal wedding was so very soon…

And then they were gone.

As if they had never been there at all.

And he sent back the crisis plan, nine months now, not twelve and he was about to send another round of very harshly worded texts when one appeared on his screen.

Not about the stability of a foreign economy or the fall of a military dignitary thousands of kilometers away from him. Without any emails or attached files or need for orders and instruction.

Another, secondary text appeared on the screen and he was already running down the hallway, not texting but yelling to have the car started.

The second text still lingered on the screen.

Don’t Panic.  
<3 Mrs. Hudson

 

Today was not a good day.

Today they did not want to hide in small dark places or run through the halls and rooms playing detective.

Today they did not want to let go of each other at all.

It had been a mistake. A split second John wished he could take back.

They thought they could do what the older kids were doing. They thought if they could just get closer, just take a look and watched how they held themselves, how they moved as if they were invincible, as if they were untouchable, dancing instead of just fighting, then they could do it too.

They knew how to stand and to breathe, knew how to tumble without hurting themselves.

But they wanted to be strong. They could be strong.

Be safe.

They just wanted to watch.

To look.

To learn.

Easy as remembering.

They did not know they had come too close.

John felt it before it happened, in his gut, in somewhere without words or thought.

A moment where his heart stopped and it was too late to scream.

And Sherlock went down, he was in the air, off his feet, and then he was on the ground, body reverberating with the secondary impact, too shocked to gasp, the air in his lungs already gone.

A small white body splayed on the mats, black curls falling to the floor.

Words like an echo of gunfire exploded in John, strangling his mind until they swallowed him and there was nothing left.

Trajectories, impact weight, internal organs, nerve clusters, bone density.

Like bullets and shrapnel and hand to hand combat and wounds and internal bleeding and trauma and death and life and instant, emotionless inhuman analysis.

He was not hurt, but he was.

Everyone was around them, like the world had stopped turning, all of the fighting, the warriors turned back into children, untouchable gods reverted into fallible teenagers. Meaningless word rose around them like the incoming tide, rising to a panic pitch, bodies moving around them, endless Korean.

Hands reaching out to touch them but holding back as one voice barked an order John did not even consider.

An order not to touch.

John was on his knees next to him, hands on his face, cupping his cheek, brushing the black curls from his face.

He was okay.

Blue eyes stared up into him as he took his first shuttering painful breath and panic creeped at the edge of his consciousness.

Bruises without a doubt, a fracture of the eighth and ninth ribs possible but unlikely. Hard to breathe. Painful to breathe.

And John knew what it meant to hear Sherlock gasp in the night, to hear him drag in each breath as if it would be his last and wake with a soundless cry and sob without words or tears into his chest in the darkness of their room.

He could see the pain, the panic in Sherlocks eyes as the breath filled his lungs and it stopped and hitched in pain.

John would make all of that go away.

‘With me.’ John whispered.

He lowered himself until his breath gusted against Sherlock’s cheek as he took slow shallow breathes. He wanted to erase the sounds of the world, erase everyone but them, wanted to hide them with his body.

John smiled against Sherlock’s skin as the other boy reached up and a small hand tangled with the blond hair at the base of his neck and held him there.

Sherlock did not panic. He did not cry.

Sherlock was always brave.

John leaned back so he could share his smile with him, to show Sherlock how proud he was of him, that of course he knew he would be okay. He kissed his forehead and watched his clear blue eyes as the nightmares failed to swallow him, he watched Sherlock push back the panic and the screams and the men who were not really there.

Sherlock reached out a hand and John let it pull him back down, he let himself fall until their breaths mingled and all he could see was Sherlock and all Sherlock could see was him.

John kissed him again.

Sherlock was brave and they were learning to forget the bad things, but sometimes he just needed John.

 

Mycroft was not sure what the most disturbing part of the morning had been.

The text was horrific.

His heart had been racing the moment he read it until he rushed inside to find a crowd of children surrounding his boys.

They were lying on the floor together. It was obvious what had happened. An accident. They were in the wrong part of the room, so they had been sneaking somewhere. Trying to do what they had been told was still too advanced for them.

His heart stopped pounding in his chest when he heard not one but two soft voices whispering together.

They were laying so close that Mycroft doubted they could see him at all, John carefully holding himself above Sherlock, Sherlock’s hands twisted into Johns hair, not gripping in pain but in the absentminded way of children holding onto something they love.

The pattern of their speech did not change but they seemed to move in unison, John rolling off to look up at him as Sherlock let go and held an offered hand instead, laying very still on the ground but looking up at him with wide blue eyes that held only the slightest sign of discomfort.

John took a deep breath, filling his chest but his voice came out breathy and childlike. “Extensive bruising. Possible fracture of his eighth rib. No sign of concussion or further injury.”

And with that Mycroft heart began pounding again.

 

The doctor was waiting for them in a safe building nearby by the time they arrived. John was right of course. Sherlock would be fine, just a little banged up, no worse than he had had as an adult or a child for that matter.

Externally they were both doing fine. Sherlock was already trying to pretend that it did not hurt at all, that of course he would be able to attend class tomorrow and John was smiling and playing along with him and pretending that he was tired so that Sherlock would sit with him.

Internally Mycroft knew better than to take their smiles at face value. He could see the way it hurt Sherlock to breathe and the way that every once in a while he would wince with something more than pain. He caught the fleeting panic in Johns eyes as he caught a flash of purple skin beneath the collar of his shirt, the way he would take half a step too close to Sherlock and his eyes would dart for the exit, for somewhere to hide.

Three texts had come in during during his preoccupation on his ‘opinion’ of offering military help to Libya, four ‘Immediate crisis’s’ and one ‘impending doom’ still lingered in the dim future for the day ahead. A day where ever minute he spent in the oblivion of work his boys would be fighting to keep their sanity.

The boys had finally settled together in their room, they asked for nothing, they did not cry or whimper or demand the basic necessities of the true childhood he had foolishly hoped he could offer.

They never asked Mycroft to make the nightmares go away.

They never asked to feel safe.

He could spend the day on the phone heaped in digitalized information, and they would survive, they would wake up the next morning and if he found the time they would kiss him and let him hold them in his arms.

He could spend the day being as Sherlock had once called him, the smartest man in England, he could utilize these hours to be the silent Alexander of his time and in the darkness just feet away he could let two little boys protect one another, distracting each other as memories from a life they no longer possessed reared up to claim their small bodies and ill equipped child minds.

Three brilliant people living together and simultaneously worlds apart, separate parallel lives.

But today would not be one of those days.

Today they would do more than survive.


	28. Chapter 28

The boys were reluctant to come out of their room, to remove themselves from the soft dark cocoon they had settled into, a place where only the sound of each other’s breaths could be heard, where nothing could trigger a dream, a lost memory.

But they trusted him.

They loved him.

So when he called to them they came, two boys wandering from their own darkness, blinking into the light of the hallway as if they were still drifting through existence, teetering on the edge of two worlds and firmly planted in neither.

It was foolish, an indulgent fantasy and a trick of an overworked mind but it seemed to Mycroft that if he dared to touch them they would not really be there at all. His out stretched hand would pass through the empty air and they would never have been there at all.

The blinds and curtains in the living room had been drawn leaving the resplendent golden room in a murky haze, like old-time theatres lit by candlelight, like horse drawn carriages and cobblestone roads.

The couch, perfect and ornate as a museum piece, had been pushed back against the wall and in its wake as if they had been hiding there all along lay bundles of soft plush blankets, heaps of pillows like an incredible disaster of a child’s sleepover, a disaster like the freedom of children who do not yet think in folds and perfect wrinkleless existences where everything is even and meticulous.

The boys hesitated, proof of how far they had gone, how far they had wandered away from him.

Could they even hear him?

When they closed their eyes, when they blinked, could they remember this world at all?

Mycroft kicked off his shoes, not untied, not removed, but toed them off and let them lay where they fell, sideways and misused. He could feel careful eyes burning into him, evaluating every motion, the way every muscle was held, the ease or hesitance in the way he moved.

He shrugged off his jacket leaving only his white shirt and tie, awkward and bright in the dim room, like the soft light had only been waiting for the moment to latch onto him.

The jacket fell to the ground in a heap and his shirt was wrinkled and pulled up just a little on the left and as he sat down in the mess of pillows and blankets it was not awkward. It was perhaps not the way a father would call to his child to come to him but in the way of the big brother. A silent gesture, a shared smile.

Like the most unlikely twins in existence, like darkness and light, they came hand in hand. John smiling just a little and Sherlock carefully watching everything, absorbing and wanting so much to trust but not being able to let go when the memories clawed at his mind.

When he held out his arms to them, open and foolish and letting them choose weather or not to trample his olive branch, putting more of himself on the line that he would have with any military insurgency or plan to save the world, they seemed to stumble back into this reality.

When they reached out and small hands touched his open palms, when small bodies curled against him, with him in a tumble of pillows in a faded gilded world they remembered who they were, they regained their place in the world.

They tossed and turned and fought with pillows and tangled in blankets and elbows fell into holes where the hardwood floor alone lay beneath them until they lay together as if it were Mycroft who had been transformed.

Three little boys trading secrets without words, laying together as if they had forgotten who’s limb belonged to whom.

Retrieving the remote control from the settee became a game of thrown blankets dragging across the floor and limbs pinned down by artificial laziness.

It was John who finally, laughingly, extracted himself from the mess and captured the controller like a concurring hero while Mycroft and Sherlock exchanged glances of silent lazy victory, a secret plan all along working in perfection under their unspoken brilliance.

The movies started easily, like flowing water instead of the forced way in which Mycroft had chosen them before with intense and worrisome care.

Their conquering hero, their white night with the glistening blond hair and the Remote of Power was given the first choice of movies, Sherlock’s smile almost like silent laughter as John wielded the remote as he imagined a Knight of the round table might have done before he was tumbled back into their warped embrace.

Mycroft expected them to pick up on the more mature themes, he expected the brilliance he had come to know, but it was the laughter that shocked him.

They laughed at the silly childish things, they giggled at faces meant to be absurd the way any five year old in the world might do, they laughed at the complicated, they laughed at word play which a child twice their age would stumble over, they laughed at nuances Sherlock as an adult might have scoffed at as his peers in age if not intelligence let the moment pass them by unnoticed.

And because he was one of them, a tangle of limbs and heartbeats and breathes and blankets, he felt it too, the laughter building somewhere deep that he had all but forgotten existed, and he laughed too.

But this was not meant merely to pull them from their inflicted melancholy or even to prove that he knew his boys better than Harry Watson with her icecream and easy laughter.

This was a test.

The movie had John from its first nearly unspoken ‘ I love you’.

The Princess Bride had been an easy choice after hours of careful deliberation, John, enigmatic child that he was, plucked it from the pile without a word of explanation, just a smile as he wielded his remote sword.

Perhaps it was the secret language between the two leads almost before the movie had begun, or maybe it was the duality of two simultaneous existences, each seemingly real in its own turn. The child tucked safely into bed as his grandfather reads a story, the swords and death and separation in another world, but John was enraptured.

At first Mycroft imagined as he watched the little blond that he was, as all children do, imagining himself as the lead, as the daring hero dashing through. That maybe it was nothing more than simple childish pleasure that drew him into the embrace of the film.

But he grew still and quiet when another child would have ignored the emotional repercussions, would have failed to understand and continued in a safe swell of bravado. Mycroft wanted to pull him into his arms so that he was against his chest and whisper that the character was not really dead, that he would be alright.

But John had not imagined himself as the hero at all. His tears were silent save for a soft sniffle as he laid his head in Sherlock’s lap and let other boy brush away his tears without shame.

John had been the princess all along. The one with the unknown background, the one left waiting, only able to hear stories but unable to help when the injuries were already partially healed.

It was not that John needed to be saved.

It was that to him, Sherlock been the hero all along.

They were warm and sweet in the blue white glow of the television screen, the mood of the movie pressing itself upon them, a slow silent building happiness that stretched into the time beyond the frame of the movie.

He never wanted to move.

It was a surprise to all of them when it was Sherlock who got up, carefully picking his way to the stack of movies and lowering himself onto the ground with the light caution that knows pain in one form or another would be inevitable for a long time.

He deliberated silently as John watched him upside down, sprawled on his back letting his head tip off a stack of lopsided pillows not to make anyone laugh but as if he were so deep in contemplation that he had not noticed the way he sat at all, bit simply moved unconsciously to keep Sherlock in his gaze.

Mycroft untangled himself from their cocoon, careful not to dislodge John’s easy sprawl. He was hesitant to walk away, to stand, as if it would betray him for the adult he was and he would break this strange spell and he would once more be the brother looking in. Instead he shuffled on his knees, not a crawl but an extended reach, the bag sitting abandoned on the floor behind them.

Crawling back to John he threw the packages on the floor as if they did not matter, as if it were of no consequence to him if the boys ate at all. Some of the bags were familiar but far away, sweets from his own childhood, sweets that on the rare trip home he would have shared with his tiny baby brother.

The screen flicked to life with previews and Sherlock made his careful way back to them, sitting against the pillows tenderly, upright and attentive as if to see if he had chosen correctly. John looked at the candies fleetingly but turned away from the television to watch Sherlock in his unabashed manner.

The bag crackled as he opened it drawing two sets of eyes onto himself. He refused to acknowledge his audience, carelessly opening the bag and silently praying that one of the few wasted afternoons of his youth had not been utterly forgotten.

It should have been easy. The toss of the Jelly Baby into the air, the force, the trajectory, the exact place and time to open his mouth to catch it as it descended back towards them from its short flight. The victory of the small candy landing on his tongue should not have merited the sense of accomplishment it did but it was all he could do not to utter a cry of victor.

He wanted to play it off as if it was nothing, the legacy of the older brother, like blowing bubbles with gum, like learning to whistle.

He failed utterly. He was not cool or restrained. He was ecstatic that it worked and they knew it.

Sherlock watched his complete failure at being the cool older brother, there were a million things to laugh at, to mock, or he could ignore it completely, wait for the movie to start and let the moment fade into oblivion.

But Mycroft was one of them.

His victory was theirs.

And maybe…it was still a little bit cool despite himself. Just a little enviable.

Sherlock carefully picked a candy from the bag and threw it into the air, scowling when it missed and hit his cheek. Again he searched carefully through the bag, collecting several this time and keeping them in the palm of his hand.

John and Mycroft realized it at the same moment. They had imagined Sherlock was being careful, that he did not want to touch the candy, did not want to be seen touching it.

He was in fact touching all of them, pushing the undesirable colors out of the way until he had taken only fire-engine cherry red.

Red Jelly Babies fell out of the sky, falling against Sherlock’s upturned face.

John took a rouge handful, all colors tossed into the air, it was only a moment before with a started gasp of surprise, he found a candy had hit its mark. Laughter mixing with candy and becoming something brilliant.

The preview played to a chorus of surprised exclamations and muttered curses, images played to the fallen bodies of dozens of colorful candies. New bags were opened, torn plastic ripping down the sides to spill bright candies over the floor and the foods that had been nothing but toys became…well, edible toys.

Mycroft threw another careful piece into the air, wanting to keep his record intact, wanting to maintain a little of that cool mystique.

He closed his eyes for added effect, judging where it would be, knowing where it would be, leaning his head back.

But then it never came.

The candy did not hit him unpleasantly in the face or lodge itself unfortunately down his throat.

There was an honest moment of pure confusion until he heard it in his ear. The sound of giggling.

Sherlock was standing next to him, their faces level, his little hand clutching the candy he had caught from the air. He waited until Mycroft caught his eye and giggled once more rebelliously, holding out the candy to as if to offer it back before popping it into his own mouth with a grin.

“Look” He said through half chewed red candy, smirk still twisting his cherub lips. “I save you the green ones.” A little hand offered him a mass of slightly smushed green candies, Mycroft took one and under the intense gaze of the five year old and put one into his mouth.

Sherlock smiled.

“Booger flavored.”

Mycroft swallowed his decidedly lime flavored candy but Sherlock was already laughing at his own joke, delighted how well it had worked out, his eyes shinning with the mirth of a five year old boy.

Mycroft made a show of swallowing again and wiped his hand ungentlemanly against his lips, leaving a scowl of distaste as false as the laughter beneath it was real.

Sherlock was watching him as if he were the greatest thing he had ever seen, as if the day began and ended with him, eyes wide so as not to miss a single thing.

Mycroft growled and pulled the boy gently into his arms, mindful of his injuries, of the slightest hint of a memory, of the flinch of the recognizable, but all he did was laugh.

“Cheeky!” He pinned the little boy in his arms and pressed a loud kiss to his cheek which Sherlock pretended to fight but only made him giggle more. Another kiss to his hair, his nose, to blue eyes which sparkled.

“John!” Sherlock cried between laughter, and it was Johns turn to be the hero.

Little arms encircled Mycroft’s neck from behind and a blond head bobbed into view as a kiss was pressed to his cheek, loud and wet and ending with a triumphant ‘Ha!’

Mycroft stopped as peal of helpless laughter captured him in its grip. John was climbing ontop of him, into his arms, wet baby kisses messily pressed to his cheeks. And when it stopped, when the laughter had subsided two boys had settled in his arms, Sherlock laying over them both, his curly hair falling in a mess over Johns lap, candies scattered everywhere like colorful beacons in their self-imposed dusk he knew that he would give the world not to move from this place.

One text and an exuberant sigh later Mrs. Hudson came into the room with her hands planted on her hips saying nothing as she swept the remote off of the abandoned couch and tossed it into Mycroft’s waiting hands only a few feet away. The three boys on the floor watched her silently, three pairs of eyes waiting to see her mouth dip in annoyance or curve in amusement as she berated in her motherly tone that they were utterly helpless without her. Mycroft thought he saw something flicker in her eyes as she examined them, the mess of candies and pillows and blankets and the stack of movies in a crooked tower at the foot of the screen but she was an expert at subterfuge, her face betrayed nothing but perhaps lingered too long on Sherlock’s lounging form.

The movie played for a few minutes, the lulls in scripted words leaving places for the sound of their soft breaths to echo the feel of the bodies tangled against him, a breath matching the rise of a chest. They had barely begun to learn the characters when a sliver of light invaded their movie dusk and Mrs. Hudson slipped unobtrusively into their darkness, a tray of sandwiches in her white hands.

She went to set the tray onto the table, paused as if reconsidering, and then set the lot on the floor bathed in the blue glow of the screen. Mycroft could see one sandwich devoid of crusts, one cut into perfect simple triangles and one which looked suspiciously infused with nutritional additives and cardboard flavoring.

In the light of the dim room she seemed to pull all of the light into herself, lighting the smile she let drift onto her face.

“Three of you deserve one another-” she mumbled shaking her head and turning to leave. “Just lucky I love you.”

Light had spilled back into the room from the hallway heralding her exit when John turned so he could see her and smiled.

“As you wish.”


	29. Chapter 29

Sherlock stretched out his fingers in the darkness and flicked the bathroom light on, blinking against sudden glare. The door closed with a soft internal click as Sherlock moved to capture any light which might try to leak out into the bedroom beyond.

John needed his sleep.

He could have stayed in bed, he could have watched the time march slowly past on the clock and wait for the sun to finally rise and start the day. But John would know, he always knew. Sherlock was not sure if it was his breathing or if it was the way he moved, he tried to keep his breath deep and even, he tried to stay still and not squirm but if he was awake, if he couldn’t sleep, John always woke up too.

He tried different experiments, different hypothesis, but all of his tests ended the same. It was like John had an extra sense. Sight and hearing and touch and smell and taste and Sherlock. No matter what he did blue eyes would blink open and refuse to close so long as he knew Sherlock couldn’t sleep.

Tonight John needed to sleep.

John had already spent the entire day watching over him, the least Sherlock could do in return was make sure he could rest now.

Sherlock sat on the closed toilet and prodded his naked stomach, Batman sleep shirt rucked up under his chin. It was still flat, maybe slightly concave, but he could feel the stretch of food, could still taste it on his tongue even though he had brushed away the remnants. He had not been hungry, of course, but they had looked so happy. Mycroft and John. John watching and so proud and smiling.

John was good like that. John made him want to be good.

Sherlock gave up prodding the pale unblemished skin of his stretched stomach and gingerly poked the spread of black and blue which engulfed the upper portion of his chest and spread out over his shoulder and ribs like water.

It hurt, but he stayed away from where heat radiated from the injury, away from where it ached, just prodding the spread of blood black and blue where it faded to yellow and green at the edges.

He didn’t mind really.

He was strong.

Another second, another few steps and it would have been John instead of him.

John falling backward, John crying out in pain, John breaking.

And that would have been bad.

It would have been horrible.

It is unspeakable when John gets hurt. Not just because he should have done better, should have protected him and if he was hurt it meant he had failed.

Injuries did more than hurt John.

They terrified him.

They made the dreams come.

John hates when Sherlock gets hurt, he becomes quiet and hold his hand so tight it feels like maybe John can feel the pain too, but it isn’t the same.

When John gets hurt, it is like drowning. It is like not breathing, like all the good things in the Universe, all the things that make it okay, Nana and Mycroft and him, it is like they were never existed at all.

Like John cannot see them.

And no matter what he does or says or screams, Sherlock cannot reach him.

Like John can dissolve. Like he can disappear so seamlessly that some people do not even know he is gone, but Sherlock knows. He knows when John is vanished and the hand he is holding is nothing, a doll left where his John should be. He is touchable and warm and human and real, and you do not have to blink for it to happen but if you could break him open, tear him apart in your hands, he would be the hollow space in the bodies of old toys. Dead air and crumbling plastic.

Nothing.

Injuries are the only things John ever keeps secret from him.

A scrape, a bruise, anything visible, anything that should be kissed better or fussed over, John hides as if it is a terrible secret. Like it is wrong.

Like it is his fault.

John lets him see when they are alone, when they are locked away in the semidarkness of their room and Sherlock demands to see or else he will not sleep, will not eat. When he needs to know that John is okay even though logically he knows that it is just a cut, just a scrape…

But Nana can never see, Mycroft can never see. Not even when Sherlock asks, when he pleads because it looks inflamed and angry and red.

But what if one day it was bad?

What if one day they needed to look?

What if something happened that Sherlock could not fix?

What if he needed to protect John, what if he needs to be strong and brilliant and good and he fails?

What would happen when they forced him, to help him, and never knew that John was dissolving?

Sherlock put his hand over his stomach again, feeling the stretch of food beneath his palm.

Healthy. Good.

John is always fixing him, watching over him, making him good. John knows how to make him better.

Sherlock would fix John too.

 

Mycroft turned off the alarm clock which informed him in its hideously honest way that he had three more hours of rest available to him. As if sleep was truly as simple as that.

The tiles on the bathroom floor were cool, the room holding its reservoir of night air, an unconscious balm on his sleepless body. He switched on the light and let it wash over him, yellow white light bleeding through his closed eyelids.

If he was going to be awake he might as well do so fully dressed.

Mycroft was never one to let ideas haunt him; there was no use in lingering over the impossible or letting emotion stand in the way of solution.

But of course his boys, as always, were the exception to the otherwise stalwart rule; their complications following him into his almost rest.

He did not want them to grow up. The idea of pushing them back into adulthood or forcing their education onto them preemptively was…repulsive.

He wanted them to be happy this time. He wanted a childhood they could reminisce about and smile at the memory of. A life they could be glad to have lived.

But he was holding them back.

Two isolated geniuses locked away in their tower, never interacting with more than a handful of others, never experiencing the world as normal children because of course they were extraordinary and nothing approaching normal.

But how could he thrust them into more, into education and society and everything they would need to survive life without knowing how they would fair? Without knowing if they could interact with others? Without knowing if they could pass as normal when they were anything but?

It seemed like a simple test, to take them out, to watch them interact, to watch them thrive or fail where he could be there to catch them if they should fall. Harry did it all the time, treated them as if they were little boys, as if no matter what they did they would come out alright, the fleeting consequences of childhood, a real childhood.

Simple really, to take them out to a meal as if they were any other family.

Mycroft gave one reproachful glare to his bed and carried on in the pre-morning darkness to find his first cup of strong tea.

After all, there were only 137 separate and plausible ways this could go wrong before Sherlock uttered his first bleary eyed hello and conceded that pants might be necessary for a trip outside.

 

The boys went out with Mycroft, of course. They went to museums and got to look behind all of the locked doors and see restorations in progress and hidden collections and pieces that no one ever got to see but that Sherlock could touch. They visited ruins and churches and Mycroft explained the history and the architecture and John stayed close, his small hand wrapping around two of Mycroft fingers as they walked or holding onto the edge of a coat sleeve so that if he had any questions or if he wanted to hear the story again all he had to do was tug- just a little.

When Mycroft took them out they were bound to do something grand and amazing, the kind of adventures other little boys could only dream about, if they had the imagination necessary to conjure such astounding things.

So when Mycroft promised that morning when two little boys wandered into his study, still rubbing the sleep from their eyes and clutching the orange blanket which trailed behind them like a beacon telling him that the night had been for them, difficult, that he was going to take them out, there was a moment of apprehension he could not voice.

Would he disappoint them to only take them to eat and to wander the city a bit on their own? Would John still want to hold his hand? Would Sherlock still whisper discoveries in his ear as if they were secret and divine?

John was pouting; a nightmare rather than memories then had haunted his restless sleep. Mycroft wondered what had kept Sherlock from waking him as he normally did on such occasions.

Sherlock closed the door behind them, John tended to fall between memories and old habits when he was tired, like his mind had not fully woken to the proper reality yet. He waited for the click if the door lock and his shoulders relaxed, slumping into the safety they both knew he felt. John slumped over to where Mycroft sat and very much like the small child he resembled, scrambled into Mycroft’s lap, curling into his arms and closing his eyes, small fist rising to curl into Mycroft’s perfect shirt, linen crinkling beneath his fingers.

“Where are we going?” Sherlock seemed unperturbed by John actions, only walking closer, pulling out the drawers of Mycroft’s antique desk and using them as steps to sit himself on top of the desk so that his legs brushed Johns body as they dangled, his hand reaching out mindlessly to tangle in the blond strands as his eyes wandered over Mycroft’s papers, top secret documents concerning at least four countries and one impending war.

Mycroft coughed in slight reprimand at the blatant disregard for not only his property but for the papers Sherlock knew he was supposed to leave alone. The boy smiled, a small private thing accompanied by a slight shrug as if to say ‘Afghanistan again huh?’ and waited for a reply to his question.

Mycroft could see why Sherlock had not woken John now. Sherlock had not been in bed at all, save for perhaps the few minutes before John woke.

Again Mycroft felt the old emotions sweep through him as familiar blue eyes stared unblinkingly into him, sleep deprived and holding that wordless spark of untested hypothesis.

It was an emotion that was more memory than it was relevant and real to the child sitting in front of him. Something he should be able to tamp down and separate utterly from the present.

But he could feel it, the way he felt it when he was telling himself that museums and galleries were simply the proper places to take his boys.

That gut deep feeling, the knowledge, that Sherlock would rather be any place on earth than with him. That if he brought work, brought information to occupy every moment they spent together he could steal a few precious moments, but never, never just to be with him.

“To lunch,” His voice did not shake. “Perhaps walk around for a bit if you are up to it.”

He did not betray the way he was waiting for the rejection or at best, disappointment.

Sherlock nodded, not as if he were disappointed or upset or bored or all of the other things Mycroft’s betraying subconscious were searching for, but as if he had taken the data and found it acceptable, turning away and back to the papers, idly playing with them as if he could not feel Mycroft’s anxiety raking over him. Mycroft closed his arms around John and shifted his slight weight in his lap just to feel him curl closer.

John had fallen asleep in his arms, the smile on his lips half hidden against his own chest.

“Mycroft.” A bare foot prodded his thigh to get his attention. Sherlock’s curls bounced as he looked up from the paper he was holding with the word CONFIDENTIAL stamped across its manila folder.

“When do I get to run a country?”

 

It was a small restaurant, unassuming, and only a handful of families were seated in the booths lining the walls, small children cooing at one another from highchairs blocking the aisles like dogs barking their greetings at each other over fences and yards. The wait staff was predominantly young, some working their way through university, others decidedly not. The nighttime crowd would have been different, tables lit with candles and couples imagining that they see love in each other’s eyes, the dim lighting making their pupils blow wide in an imitation of unconscious desire.

But for now John is holding his hand and they fit into the scenery like another essential piece to this three dimensional puzzle, Sherlock marching a step ahead of them, oddly in sync with his surroundings and the children emoting from their tables all around them.

Mrs. Hudson thought herself quite clever when she recommended this place, it was the way she smiled, the way her voice was just the side of too cheerful, purposeful tells that she used when she wanted you to know her secret but thought that words would be too indelicate, that her joy would ruin it.

Of course Mycroft knew this place before she had ever said a word or smiled that smile, mentioning how often they had gone as adults together, how often they would come home with a takeout box and the remains would be left on the table when they ran out the door, two forks poking out at odd angles.

He had CCTV footage from the very first day they spent together here, a camera peering into the table by the window, a candle lighting their faces in soft shadows and light.

Sherlock walked up to the young woman in charge of seating, early twenties, recently engaged but they will push up the wedding as soon as she finds out she is pregnant, family values and all. Mycroft expects wide eyes, perhaps a loud declaration of her pregnancy or a demand for the table he prefers but instead Sherlock ducks his head shyly, peering up at her through what Mycroft knows from experience are almost absurdly long black eyelashes. John is holding on tighter to his hand but the woman is already squatting to the floor, making the soft cooing words that people make to small frightened animals and meek children. Mycroft is reminded suddenly of cooing to a small, ferocious, bear.

Mycroft steps forward, ideas half formed in his mind of saving the young woman but his vantage point improves as he moves. Sherlock is smiling at her, his entire demeanor one of coy sweetness. He points to a table, hesitantly, shyly, and she spends the next five minutes cleaning the table by the window while Sherlock asks her eighty points of interest he thought of the second he walked into the establishment.

John watches silently, he holds on to Mycroft’s hand and watches with curiosity and something that might be begrudging amusement. Sherlock waves them over when the table is clean, exasperated motions, and John does not run to him as Mycroft thought he would. John is slow and calm; he grips Mycroft tighter and stays by his side as they walk.

Whatever Sherlock is up to he knows exactly what he is doing.

And more worryingly, this time John does not share this knowledge.


	30. Chapter 30

They are giving him faces. Not bad faces. Not faces that mean pain or anguish or fear or he would stop.

They are watching him, bemused and interested. Mycroft looks…wary, like he might smile if the experiment turns out to be to his liking but is prepared to frown and adopt the sternness he chooses for sheets of paper and endless phone messages. John, John is watching him like he is laying everything on his trust of him, he is watching him with wide eyes that are not hurt but might be. He is trying to explain to himself that it will be alright, normally a job Sherlock would undertake, not with words but with a look, or by reaching out and touching him, by pressing their foreheads together and letting him understand. John is trying not to wonder why he was not told what Sherlock was doing, why he finds himself alone and lost in this.

Sherlock doesn’t like that look even if it means John trusts him.

He doesn’t like feeling alone.

But John will understand soon.

He is doing this for him.

He still wishes he could have explained. He wants to reach out and pull him closer, wants to feel him in his arms, but he doesn’t. It would ruin everything.

He sits at the table and tries to smile in a way that evokes trust. John’s face twists like he is trying to understand and then as if he might laugh.

Sherlock makes a mental note to work on his ‘trust me’ face.

The waitress comes over and she is almost too easy. She is already smiling at him, she comments on his ‘pretty hair’ and asks if John and he are twins. Mycroft flinches. Not a flinch as much as a blink, a pause, a fraction of a heartbeat but his smile is forced and painful to behold.

Sherlock makes a note to look it up later.

The girl does not notice. Her smile is big and simple and Sherlock wonders what it must feel like. That simple happiness. A mind where the looks of a stranger could make you feel joy.

Sherlock smiles at her. The one he practiced all night. He fists his hand into the hem of his shirt and twists it coyly as if in distraction and lets his face go slightly red as if her compliment was enough to make him blush.

Her smile grows larger.

By the time the drinks hit the table other wait staff is passing the table, glancing at them, sending them smiles. Some make silly faces with tongues and rolled eyes and Sherlock wishes it was a booth. He wishes he were closer to John, wants to feel the silent laughter in his chest as these adults do these bizarre things, wants it to be a secret amusement shared between them. Them against the world.

He wants to lean over and whisper in his ear because John loved that story when Mycroft sat and read it to them. He wanted the words over and over so Sherlock learned them for him.

‘Lord what fools these mortals be.’

He wants to make John smiles the way they smile.

He orders food because Mycroft is trying to teach them to be sociable, because he is worried about this, about taking them out, just the three of them. It was written into every fiber of his being that morning, his…hesitance. Worried about something, something Sherlock cannot pin down. But Mycroft always worries about them. It is not uncommon. Most times he can pin it down, make it better, make him stop frowning, make that fake smile go away. But not today.

Mycroft is not like other people. He is more…complex.

So Sherlock is good.

Tries to be good.

Sometimes it is hard to tell what he is supposed to do but this must be close. Playing like this, it is working.

He smiles at the girl and trips over his words on purpose. ‘s-ghetti please’. She smiles at him while he plays with his shirt, smiles until he pulls the collar up to his mouth and bites at it for a moment as he has seen other children do. The way it stretches the material, the way it falls in a deep wet semicircle over their chests.

She is asking something about the food, butter or marinara, her smiling green eyes still fixed on him when he lets the material fall, when he tugs at the hem and her painted mouth falls open silently. John stiffens from across the table like he has been electrified and if Sherlock did not know better, if he did not know John, as if he might cry out.

He can feel their eyes, all of them, Mycroft and John and the girl boring holes into the blackened skin of his chest, each on the edge of their own abyss of specific panic.

He smiles as if he does not notice. Beaming. He laces his hands into the hem of his shirt, pulling it another inch down and looks up at her and inquires very, very sweetly.

“Do you have cookies?”

She leaves without asking and that is okay, he knows she is going to tell the others.

They circle like sharks, past the table, the rumor mill of an enclosed society at work. Within two minutes the wait staff all know, another three and the cooks and owner will wish they could circle by to look for themselves.

John is handling it well.

Normally John does not feel the need to hide Sherlock’s battle wounds the way he would hide his own. That panic does not come when Sherlock displays a scraped knee, when bruises colour his pale arms but this is something new, these injuries look as bad as they feel.

Crushing injuries.

Human inflicted injuries.

These wounds trigger something that makes John want to hide him away and let no one close enough to see them and never, ever, close enough to touch them. Sherlock knows, he understands.

When John had pulled out of his arms that morning and barely awake pulled a shirt with a high collar and half sleeves and silently handed it to him with a gravity that begged not to be demanded aloud Sherlock knew that now more than ever he had to do this. This could hurt. This could fail.

This could work.

John was evaluating every person who walked by them now, resolutely not looking at Sherlock, eyes hard and unblinking as they took apart each person who came their way. Some foolish girls still tried to smile at them, tried to pull a face while they thought Mycroft was not looking just to make them laugh, make them smile, but John was untouchable. He shocked them now as much as Sherlock had with his destroyed skin. He was piercing, distant, so hard and painful that their animated faces dropped in shock, as if they had opened a door expecting a child and had found themselves face to face with a snarling wolf.

The frequency of the walk byes were dropping. This would never do.

It was simple to calculate, easier to accomplish. John was not watching him and Mycroft would not stop him, he knew that this was important. The glass was cold, the milk colder as it soaked into his shirt and splashed against his skin but no one even knew until the glass shattered into a thousand glittering pieces on the floor.

John jumped. He forgot his calm, his anger and that anyone else had ever existed at all, let alone spared them the time or effort of thought or a watchful gaze. He was standing, splashing in milk, letting it soak into his shoes, crunching glass carelessly beneath his feet as he reached out to touch.

Sherlock waited, he let John grab fistfuls of his wet shirt and assure himself that he was unharmed, he waited until the silence was deafening and more eyes peered out of the dark corners of the establishment than another person might have thought existed at all and then, in the silence, he began to cry.

His sobs were soft and broken by hiccups which rocked his body and made his ribs ache. Tears wet his eyelashes and spilled down his pale cheeks leaving salty trails like acid on his dry face, falling into his wet shirt and then, when the stunned silence had John leaning against him, into blond hair.

It took no more than 30 seconds before two of the women were at his side, one equipped with a broom and the other with nothing more than a smile and a soft voice that sounded almost a bit like Grand-mère if he could have forgotten the soothing words and let the tone wash over him. He hiccupped painfully until John, brilliant John, climbed up onto his chair beside him, arms curling unobtrusively around his waist, waiting for whatever this was to end. Sherlock could feel the shock in the breath against his neck, feel Johns heart hammering and pressed against his own back. He did not need the soft, whispered ‘Sherlock…’

But it was sweet and it was warm and it was all of the reasons he had to do this.

A stack of napkins came a moment later, the woman from the door abandoning her post and baring not only that but a fresh cup of milk and a smiled which was not dimmed by the cliché she offered.

Sherlock sniffed. His face was flushed and his lips red with sorrow, when he took one of the napkins and looked up at the small crowd of adults with his eyelashes clumping together with tears he knew that every eye was on him, he could feel it in the way John held him, one small hand lightly holding his shirt in place.

John let go when Sherlock’s hand covered his. Even now, with his heart pounding and his breath growing shallow and quick on the back of his neck John deferred his trust to him.

It didn’t hurt to have them watch this, but the silence, the cold gasps, were familiar in a way that he could not place.

A word rose unbidden.

Freak

They were silent as Sherlock wiped the worst of the liquid from his bared chest, the shirt damp and uncomfortable where he had crushed it under his chin, milk slipping further down as it escaped the cloth. Pure white streams against garish black. John was frozen. Sherlock could feel his eyes pressed into his neck, closed against the world, he was silent now, his breathing strange and hindered and unnatural, the breathing of those trying not to exist.

He did not mind the injuries, the way they stared at him and wondered How? Why? It was good, right. It was going to show John that it is okay to be hurt.

But he could hear it escalating in his mind.

Freak.

Freak.

Freak.

He pushed it back. Down. It didn’t matter. This mattered.

He smiled at them.

Mycroft was speaking, a few short words thanks or apologies or both. He couldn’t hear the words over the voices in his mind. The eyes that were glaring but did not exist here and Sherlock found himself swept up into strong arms; found his wet t-shirt pressed against an expensive suit, his face buried in Mycroft’s chest as John was pulled up against him. As Johns cheek pressed against his own and they were breathing Mycroft and each other and they were moving and the voices didn’t matter because John was holding on so tight…

“Shh” Mycroft breathed into his hair as cool air enveloped them, the clean glimmering tiles of the empty bathroom, small, barely big enough to fit the three of them.

So small every foot was filled with just them. Good.

The voices died.

The glaring cruel eyes disappeared from his mind as if they had never been there at all.

Sherlock let himself be set down on the small counter against the aging glass of flowers, the leaves pressing into his back and crumbling to pieces against his skin.

Mycroft gently pulled his shirt off of his body, threading his compliant limbs through the holes, keeping the wet material from his face. He was silent as he worked, crushing the liquid from the shirt and then dabbing it with towels, his motions soothing and deliberate.

John was holding onto him, one small hand twirled around his wrist, not his hand. A hand could let go. He was looking for ways onto the counter, considering climbing the toilet, clambering up Mycroft, but there wasn’t time for that.

It would be uncomfortable, there was no room for both of them up here but Sherlock wished John would climb up and they would have to tangle their limbs and hold on tight just stay upright.

John was not talking, he was not broken or haunted, the words had not been stolen from him or ripped from his throat. His words had been stilled. A conscious effort. He was not pleased with Sherlock.

Sherlock wondered if John felt as abandoned as he felt desolate.

Being so close, Johns hand on the skin of his wrist, he wanted more. He wanted the silent communication. He wanted to whisper to him all of the things that jumped to his mind, he wanted to evaluate people’s reactions just to hear John laugh. He wanted to tell him about the voices.

He had never heard it before. It was not the man. Not one voice, but dozens.

Cruel.

Taunting.

Freak.

Was he a freak?

What was a freak?

But he could not ask just as John would not speak to him. They were mid experiment and Sherlock had chosen to go about it alone, to cut free the other half of himself because it was the only way it would work.

Mycroft cupped his face in his large hands, warm and lightly calloused, tilting his face upwards until he could look down into his eyes, until he erased all of Sherlock’s thoughts with his gaze.

“Do you want to go back and finish?” He would have smiled if the muscles had not felt paralyzed by his earlier tears. Mycroft knew.

Mycroft always knew.

Sherlock nodded, expecting the still damp shirt but not the kiss as it was pressed to his forehead and then, impulsively, his cheek. Large warm fingers brused away the last of his tears before lifting him into his arms.

The food which had come out some time before the milk incident was cooling and unappealing, forkfuls swirled around on the plates from where they had tried to eat congealing into place with butter and cheese.

The people were still swarming, women taking a heavy tray of drinks the long way around just to see them, to offer a little smile or a worried glance to the children who had wormed their way into the consciousness of their microcosm of society.

If nothing else happened John would see how little people act, how you can bear your scars and wounds to the world and no one will even ask, restricted by society and propriety or because they imagine that someone other than themselves has it all worked out. At very least John can see how invisible you can be lost in plain sight.

It wouldn’t change anything, not really. But maybe when that one inconceivable moment happened, when there was no choice but to show his wounds to someone, he would remember this and know, at least logically, that he would be okay.

The food congealed under his fork, the milk rising slowly to room temperature.

A plate of thin Italian cookies, each piece broken into shards, into perfect child fistfuls, hit the table as a prelude to the entrance of the man bearing them. The first thing Sherlock sees is the smile, soft and amiable and caring and he does not think immediately ‘owner’, or ‘business man’. His first thought is that this man is someone’s grandfather, this man has raised children. He is plump but not too heavy considering modern day standards of obesity, and he stands at the end of the table not like an imposing stranger or with the tentativeness of a visiting guest but as if he is an unmovable object, amiable and sweet and smiling until you decided to force your way impossibly past.

Sherlock looks up at him and the man smiles and gestures at the plate of cookies all the while carrying on a friendly litany. Made them himself, he says, best in London. He smiles and carries on until both John and he take one. Delicate sugar and liquorish fill his mouth, destroying the lingering taste the smell of cooling pasta has imparted on his tongue.

As he talks, as he smiles, his eyes linger on Sherlock’s collar, the heavy material slipping low, black skin peering out and Sherlock knows this is what he was waiting for. For this man. For anyone to care.

The man squats to table level so that he is no longer towering over them, his is still smiling but his eyes grow hard as he asks the silly question, the obvious excuse for any other five year old to grasp onto if the truth had needed to be hidden.

“Did you fall, little one?”

Sherlock is ecstatic. The man is pretending the question is nothing even though the weight of it unasked has weighed down every person he has come into contact with; he is pretending he does not have his largest line cook standing by the door in wait. Sherlock beams.

“Wanna see?” Sherlock asks. He thought no one was going to act, that all of this was a wasted effort, inadvertently proving how self-centered people are, how uncaring. He lifts his shirt again and this time he doesn’t feel the word, it is silenced as the man tries to hide his shock because Sherlock is so very relieved. He did not want to prove humanity so worthless. He didn’t want that to be what John had to believe in.

The man, Angelo he tells them belatedly, laughs as Sherlock gets further into the story, telling it in loud words which make the trip across a room of practicing teenagers a mission of epic grandeur, but he isn’t exaggerating, he is sharing. To him, to John, this was how it felt. They were not walking, they were exploring, sneaking into unknown territory.

Sherlock finishes and he feels as though he might explode. He wants to laugh, to reach out and touch the man, to see what the burns on his fingers feel like, he wants to know how many children he has, how many grandchildren, what makes him care.

The man turns to John, silent John, John who has watched the entire interaction without comment or expression and through his smile he asks ‘this is what happened?’

And for the first time John smiles, just a little, a sneaking thing that means Sherlock is forgiven, a smile that means when Sherlock reaches out his hand John will still be there to take it.

“Yes.” John answers looking not at their new friend, but directly into Sherlock’s eyes over plates of food and shattered cookies and droplets of spilled milk. “But much, much braver.”


	31. Chapter 31

Life had not been going well.

In fact, life had rarely gone worse and taking into account his- to be polite- messy divorce, that was saying quite a bit.

Nothing had been going right for Detective Inspector Lestrade since Sherlock Holmes had disappeared.

It was not, of course, that that the Inspector was helpless. He had certainly brought in his fair share of culprits in his time- but Sherlock was a case onto himself. He would never let Sherlock hear him say it, god knows how he can fit into his flat with his ego as it is, but sometimes it seems like Sherlock has a way of escaping the trappings and limits of humanity and becomes something else entirely.

He said it to Doctor Watson once, as a warning as much as an admission.

Sherlock Holmes is a great man- and maybe, one day, if we are lucky, he will even be a good one.

Lestrade took another long falsely purposeful step and nearly tripped over a sun faded toy truck half buried in the sand, too lost in thought to notice his own feet. Inattentive to the point of uselessness to whoever had decided to send him here and ruin any chance his day might have had at being productive.

He was doing it again.

Sherlock is.

Not Sherlock was.

Donovan would have given him one of those looks had she caught him at it. Again.

It wasn’t as if the man were dead.

Probably.

He was just no longer- here.

Lestrade twisted as two children ran past his legs, screaming the joys of youth, oblivious as their game swallowed their perception the way thought had swallowed his own.

All right, so not here per say, not in this no name park looking for god knows what because some self-righteous government official had decreed it, but back at the Yard. At 221B Baker Street.

He had dropped in on Mrs. Hudson a few times over the years- just to check in. She had always been nice during their drugs busts after that first time, offering tea and a story Sherlock would not want shared with the general public. She shared that same look he imagined he had, the look Doctor Watson had seemed to simultaneously overcome and perfect, enamored and engulfed in a way they had never been. A look of We-Are-Fond, But-God-Knows-Why.

The first time she had been on her way out the door. She seemed confused for a second- as if she had forgotten whether she should invite him in for tea while he waits for ‘the boys’, or ask if he had been reading Doctor Watsons blog. In the end she made some stunted and obviously transparent excuse.

‘Must be off dearie! I am scheduled to go pick up…the butter. Yes. The butter.’

He had watched her walk off, an orange safety blanket peeking out of her bag as she made her way down the street.

 

He called on her again later, calling ahead this time to let her avoid him if it were all too raw.

She smiled and invited him into her flat, keeping up a running litany as she poured his tea and pushed a plate of stale biscuits towards his empty hand.

She was fine she said. Keeping busy. And wasn’t it wonderful, the last update John wrote?

Two years almost since they had left without so much as a phone call. Of course she was worried. That is what it meant to care for Sherlock Holmes, it meant to worry. But here she was, brave soul, smiling for him as if Sherlock were upstairs at this moment, safe, where she could reach out and touch him and let all of her fears melt away.

When her phone rang, a funny little chime he would never have chosen for her, she frowned and told him she really must take the call. He stood politely, saying that it was time for him to go anyway and, of course, he could let himself out.

He could not quite hear what she said as she made her way into the back room with a last wave at him and the odd chiming sound of her phone stopped with a voice too muffled to have just been due to the door. It was enough to be curious, but time was short and he was already turning away from the front door, hand searching his pocket for the cool metal of his lock picks as he made his way quietly up familiar stairs.

Two Years.

Two years and she had left the flat exactly as it had been- if a little cleaner than in his memory. The floor had been polished as if Doctor Watson could come home and thank her for it while Sherlock simmered on the settee.

That day he had left 221B Baker Street feeling that at least he was not the only one left bereft in Sherlock’s absence.

Poor Mrs. Hudson was obviously more deluded than him.

From abroad Sherlock solved the Yards cases, short answers straight to the point and words formed like a mental eye roll for two years.

And then he stopped.

All communication stopped.

Lestrade was not really surprised; he had been waiting for it if he were honest.

He could imagine it; he did imagine it. Sherlock losing the ability to speak, to function. Loosing every ounce of inhuman restraint, brilliant mind churning so fast not even his body could keep up.

All thanks to Doctor Watson.

Because of John Watson.

He remembers telling Donovan to shut it when she made crude jokes but he always secretly hoped that it was true.

That Sherlock Holmes could love another person, that by whatever infinitesimally small chance in this endless universe that the one person he had ever let in- ever wanted to be with and clung like an orphan to a lost parent- would be the man strong enough to love him back.

He didn’t know if he believed it was true.

But he wanted to.

Lazily he scanned the area again, the coffee in his hand unpleasantly hot in the almost sunny weather. The strange sort of day where darkness and light swirl around the world but never mix, illuminating one tree into brilliant verdant emerald and leaving its brethren in shadowed depth, the kind of day most people do not notice at all.

Sherlock would have noticed.

John would have been the only one to say anything about it.

Other than the weather this part of London seemed perfectly mundane, at least on the outside. Children played, mothers and nannies sat on benches watching their screaming charges.

There was a bit of woods next to the park, some sort of conservation effort more than likely, but the children stayed away from the tree line. The mothers had scolded them away from the rocky path that led to the small cliff that look over the park like a dark grey sentry. Heaven forbid one of them had to follow their child off of the tarmac.

This was. Undoubtedly. The most embarrassing point in his lengthy and often humiliatingly humbling career.

He was on the lookout for ‘strange behavior’. There had been a slight hinting towards child abductors or a white slave trade but Lestrade honestly doubted it. Why put a homicide detective on the case as an uniformed look out?

No, this was some rich bighead thinking his tot needed the ‘best man’ in the yard, the ‘best team’.

He was the most obvious choice for ‘best available high-ranking Yarder’ now that his solved homicide rate was on par with what would be normal for humans but post-Sherlock looked like a lobotomy.

At least he was doing better than Anderson.

It had been Sherlock’s birthday, a fact that he would not let on to anyone that he knew, when three liquefied bodies were sent to the station.

It took two weeks for Anderson to figure out the ‘victims’ had been pigs.

That was two months ago and Anderson still smelled of liquefied sick.

 

Lestrade tried to pick them out, the kid who had inadvertently become the low point in his career.

There were a lot of well-dressed nannies, an au pair or two and mothers who had obviously not paid for those lips themselves.

Most of the adults were sitting on benches, bored and apathetic, but one woman was braving the plastic jungle of slides and latters. Plastic rose around her and her charge- her short blond hair bobbing and swinging boyishly as they made their slow way over to the rope bridge. The colour of her hair gave him pause, like his eyes wanted to linger on it, like a word on the tip of his tongue, an idea at the edge of his mind. He wanted her to turn around, to give him a profile, an identifying characteristic, a scar, a tattoo, to kick his mind over from curiosity into set knowledge but she was swallowed by walls of red plastic.

Lestrade closed his eyes and the pictured the park as it had been a few minutes ago- an ability he prided himself on- and acknowledged in a way that had slipped past him before that she had been standing at the vertical metal ladder for at least five minutes. A very small, very determined child then, or one with physical disabilities.

Somewhere, if he was anywhere at all, Sherlock was laughing at him.

He hung on a little tighter to the styrofoam coffee cup, feeling the form warp in his crushing embrace.

One of the nannies was eyeing him strangely.

He would never hear the end of it.

Maybe he would even get the call to check out the possible pedo with the pepper and salt hair and the mangled remains of what had once been a coffee and was now a distinguishing feature of angry red flushing over the suspects/his left hand.

He almost wanted to march up to her and pull out his badge and ask her to please not make this the worst day of his life.

But he had orders.

Instead he walked closer to the bottom of the cliff, the rocky face rising almost twice his height, leaving the alarm zone area of whatever screaming child belonged to her.

Another rush of abstract fondness swept over him as the blond woman swirled into view with a child- neither very young nor obviously physically disabled- carefully encased in her arms, the two of them laughing at the way down the thick red plastic slide so that the sound came to him like an ambulance passing into the distance, growing loud and then silent.

That was the proper way to take your child to the park, to actually interact with them as if you cared instead of tweeting like a flock of aggravated birds as he wandered by, garish hats and purses like strange bent feathers.

The blonde and the child had finally stopped, the slide ending with a twist so that he could see their profile, almost hear, like a fading call warped in his memory to become something too familiar-

‘John!’ A yell of accomplishment, of joy.

The child’s chest hitched mid-exclamation as if in pain. An injury after all.

Lestrade took a step closer, as he watched pale hands rose to press against his chest, her chest?

The clothes were that of a little boy, elastic waist jeans and a dark blue shirt with the words ‘Future King of the World’ emblazoned in white block letters but the hair, dark raven and hanging in curls, the facial features, what he had seen of them, where not feminine per say- just too pretty for a bloke.

Possible Kidnapping, reassigning gender roles as cover. Possible injury. Possible abuse.

Maybe this was not going to be the worst day of his career after all.

Lestrade took another few steps, trying to look casual. At the playground the little child was yelling again, but something had crept into the childs voice. The last cry had been on of joy- this was nothing but fear.

A pebble pinged against the back of his leg, biting into tender flesh like a bee sting in a vulnerable area.

And then they came down like rain. Dozens of small grey pebbles shifting against each other as they fell through the air, striking the ground and pinging against the rock face and up against his legs.

He heard it- a breath over the fall of stone rain- small and fragile- something that had it not been, in part, a whimper, he would not have heard it at all.

The coffee exploded against the ground- styrofoam crumpling, steaming coffee like a geyser washing over his legs.

A little boy stood on the precipice of the edge, small blue trainers peeking hanging over empty air, more pebbles crumbing as the world gave way in pieces beneath him. The scratched white of the underside of his shoes.

But it was more than that.

It was worse than that.

He had his back to the cliff.

Something up there with him worse than the fall.

A whimper. A cry. A breath.

Lestrade staggered forward, no longer falling over falling stones or half buried trucks in the sand.

Above the indistinguishable mumbling of voice a voice-deep as an adult male, the words lost to him-but not to the boy.

He never looked.

No hesitation.

He simply- fell.


	32. Chapter 32

He simply- fell.

 

Never knowing he would be caught.

 

It was rough- painful.

Arms crashed together.

Legs kicking.

They collapse together into dirt and stone.

A tangle of limbs and pounding heartbeats and a little boy who could not seem to catch his breath as if it had not been knocked out of him but stolen from him.

Behind him- behind them, a woman screamed a familiar name.

He ran his hands quickly over the little boy, his arms and his legs blissfully unbroken.

The crunch of sand and gravel beneath running feet. He hoped one of them had the foresight to call an ambulance.

His voice was rough with adrenalin as he gently tilted the boys chin so he could get a clear view of his face and measure pupil reaction.

“You are alright.” He cleared his throat and tried again, it seemed terribly intimate suddenly as the boy let his face be guided up and brown eyes looked up into him. “I have you.”

Maybe it was a reaction to the shock, or the lingering effect of whatever words had been swept away on the top of the cliff with no one but this child to hear it- but it seemed that these brown eyes were old enough to be the stars themselves, the ancient rock beneath their feet, blind and omnipotent.

They did not say anything after that.

There was no cry, no warning as a third body crashed gracefully with their tangled limbs, another body falling and climbing into his lap.

Pale hands and raven hair momentarily eclipsed the world.

A thousand words were falling from his mind, a million lost and abandoned thoughts exploding simultaneously in a million flashbulbs of light and then fading into blinding smoke.

One incredible impossibility.

The thoughts were foolish, impossible, stupid. But the two boys nearly in his arms, pressing into his body, they were real. Impossibly real.

No words came from them; he would have caught the smallest whimper, the whisper of a single syllable from his vantage point nearly holding them together, his arms holding them against himself.

But they barely seemed to be breathing.

Pale hands caught the others face, holding him, his lips moving as if to speak but there was nothing. Lips moving over and over in the same silenced pattern.

Please.

Please.

Pleasepleaseplease.

All in silence.

Lips freezing, the pattern shattered and digging into his heart.

The blonde. John. He was not moving. Not responding. He was watching something they could not see.

He could not see them at all.

It was the shock. It was his mind finally jumping track and careening into oblivion after a lifetime of Sherlock Holmes and gruesome murders and wasted lives and personal failures.

But when too familiar brilliant blue eyes welled with tears- in the moment he should have pushed the child away and carried the fallen boy to safety, to the help he so obviously needed, he came back to life in their arms.

He blinked, shaking his head as if the thoughts could be so easily erased, as if nothing at happened at all. As if he were a parent reaching out to a beloved child with a scrapped knee and a broken heart he reached out with cold hands and pulled the other boy against himself, arms folding over him, holding him to his chest, careful and gentle and only betraying his own desperation in the curling of his fingers until they were white knuckled against the blue fabric of the other boys back.

All in his lap.

In his arms.

He could feel them breathing. He could hear it as if sound had returned to them, wet and heavy and deeply human.

A hand tentatively touched messy blond hair and Lestrade looked up at the woman staring down at the two boys with a look of panic and relief fighting for dominance on her face. Her eyes flashed up to him every few seconds as if he might suddenly become something new.

He felt like a voyeur. A blush rose unbidden and hatefully onto his cheeks as if he had been caught purposefully intruding…

He could not get it out of his mind.

The act he had not seen but had imagined a thousand times.

He was watching John Watson fall a thousand miles from home.

He could see Sherlock- the man without a heart, the man with the analytical mind who thought of victims in terms of clues fall to his knees in silent tears.

He could see Sherlock watching his world fall apart.

See him in the darkness of his hiding place cutting the last ties to his life to keep John safe.

He could almost see his face in shadows in the light of the computer where John had spent so many hours.

It was stupid. Impossible.

He pushed the thoughts away by force, leaving them to linger at the edge of his mind, like a constant gnawing hunger threading into his thoughts, tainting everything.

He was seeing ghosts.

A phone chimed behind him, the woman reacted, looking away, reaching into her pocket, but the children in his arms stiffened. Their muscles tensed, holding on harder, fingers digging into skin and cloth so hard it must have hurt but neither flinched.

They were whispering to one another.

He wished he could understand what they were saying.

He wanted to hold them so close that they had no choice but to let him in.

Another flash of memory, irrepressible, rising up his throat.

Sherlock and John crouching over the body in a crime scene and the noise is deafening. Equipment whirring, people talking, the plastic shift of evidence bags, of life trying to make sense of death, and he cannot hear a single word being said but he can see their lips move.

Just a word. One word.

And he could feel their laughter, feel the connection between them as if it were palpable, a line drawn between them through open space.

Raven curls and porcelain skin.

A blond with a rueful smile.

This was not right. Not normal. They should be crying, these little boys, they should be simple, comforted with a few words, a teddy bear, a parent.

He should not be sitting here doing nothing thinking of god damn Sherlock Holmes.

The woman is tapping him on the shoulder and she is too familiar. He knows her face.

She is telling him to carry them, that they have a car ready, that they have to go. Now. She is panicking but she is trying to keep it together. The voice on the phone is giving her directions.

He can’t place where he has seen her before, if he should do what she says or take them and hold them close and run and, god help, him he looks at the babies in his arms for guidance.

The dark haired boy is a mess, he has his face buried in the other boys neck like he is trying to remember how to breath and small hands are holding him close, soothing him. The blonde, dirty blond really, with eyes Lestrade does not want to look back into is looking up at them, at him and the woman as if he is deciding the same thing, as if trying to remember who is whom and where all the pieces fit.

A crowd of tentative onlookers starts to form around them.

The boy. The blond. John. He nods, he almost smiles. As if he were the adult, as if he were trying to comfort them. He smiles as if he knows them, not just the woman but him as well.

It is enough for Lestrade. The car is waiting, he can see it across the yard.

He should absolutely not be doing this.

He should ask to see their identification. Insist on an ambulance.

But the crowd is building and the woman from before with the cold eyes is yelling, she is calling him a hero, she clutches her offspring with garish pink nails, she is drawing more people over. Not just women and children but men.

Somewhere out there the man on the hill is watching them.

Getting closer.

Someone worse than a fall.

The boys in his arms are warm and they are clinging to him now, waiting for him to stand. He shifts them, stands, and one of them whimpers, softly, not like a child should do, but as if strangling the sound, as if it is a secret.

The woman is at his side as he walks, wanting to touch, wanting to pull the boys into her arms but they are too big for that. She can’t carry both of them curled up together, an unruly illogical mass of precious children.

The car is already on and the door open, he ducks in and the woman in the park is still yelling, her voice shrill as the colour of her nails but the crowd is disappearing. Soon all that will be left of them is a crushed and abandoned styrofoam cup laying damp in the sand and gravel in a sea of overturned rocks.

Lestrade pushes himself across the seats as he balances the boys in his lap, in his arms. The three of them settle against the black leather and tinted windows as the woman closes the door behind her. The driver goes without waiting for command.

He can feel them breathing, the rise and fall of their bodies, his to protect for now. He looks down into them, but they are quiet now and all he can see is dirty blond and raven black and desperate hands fisting into baby clothes. The rest, their eyes, their voices, are just for each other.

There is nothing to do as the world passes him out the window but hold on and hope that he made the right decision.

Even if everything works out. Even if he did the right thing, even if all of the pieces fall together and everything reveals itself and everyone survives it will not be because he was a brilliant detective, a great policeman.

He has based everything off of the silent word of a child who reminded him of someone he had once known a long time ago. He has risked all of their lives on the ghost of a memory.

In the future if anyone asked, and of course they would ask, what the lowest point in his career had been he would remember the day when he took the advice of a five year old over all logic and reason. And the worst-best part? It would not be this day.

 

There is a man in his nightmares.

A silhouette without a face, a dark outline made of a thousand sounds, with feelings that exist all at once and not at all.

Like drowning.

Like being broken.

Like everything being broken.

And if you love something, if you let it show, if your eyes linger or your heart speeds up-

It breaks.

The crunch of a thousand beloved things beneath the heel of a black shoe.

The crash of a car door slamming.

The tap-tap-tap of expensive shoes leading exactly to where you are.

No matter where you hide.

He has a face.

He has seen it, knows it, but it fades like a dream.

In dreams he never looks the man in the face.

Sometimes, if you were small and quiet and you didn’t look him in the eye-

You couldn’t disappear-

But sometimes you could be nothing.

Wallpaper, a carpet, a porcelain doll.

He tried to disappear. To be nothing.

Sometimes it helped.

Like looking him in the eye meant you were still strong enough to be wrong. Like the hint of his own too blue eyes meant he was healthy enough to learn a lesson.

John has a man too.

They didn’t talk about it.

What if just hearing it, knowing it, knowing all of the awful things that happen in the darkness meant it could happen to you?

What if the man could hear him even under the blankets, pressed against John?

What if he found out how much he loved him?

What if the man did something terrible to John? What if he knew and all he could do was watch him cry and bite back a scream?

What if he hurt in a place Sherlock could not follow?

What if the man in Johns dreams did the same things the man did to him?

What if none of that happens. What if John finds out what happens to him, what if he learns the things that happen in the dead of night when it does not matter how close John holds him-

And he never looks at him the same way again?

And Sherlock losses him?

He can’t-

They don’t talk about it.

But they scream.

They cry.

They sob in the darkness before they remember they are safe, they sob in the place between worlds because when the man is there you don’t cry. You can’t cry. Can’t scream. And with John holding him tight, when John is sobbing- hiccupping against his cheek he doesn’t want to cry, he wants to be strong but sometimes he can’t help it.

Sometimes he isn’t strong enough.

Sometimes he can take a breath and hold it and think of mundane things, think about tear ducts, he can picture them, the mechanics of a tear and he can stop it from happening, and then John sniffs against him, a hand curls around the back of his neck, into his hair and he can feel him trying not to cry.

And then he can’t help it.

Not because he can still feel the blood pooling beneath his skin hot and painful, not because he is still half frozen or drowning and gasping for air- but because maybe John can feel it too and he can’t help him.

In the darkness they hold each other and they tell one another that they will be okay, that they will overcome the impossible and they will protect each other. They promise that they will be okay.

And he never asked.

A silhouette on a hill as John stands on the edge.

What did John’s man look like?

Maybe if they never said it out loud, if they kept it in shuddering exhalations hidden amongst the tears, maybe if the man was kept behind haunted eyes glistening in half moonlight he would disappear like nightmares of death and destruction.

Like when you dream everyone you love has died.

Kidnapped.

Tied down.

Little red dots of light in an otherwise darkened room, the glisten of light on water.

And you wake up to their lips pressed to your face, their hands stroking your back.

Maybe they would wake up one day and the man would never come back, as insubstantial as moonlight.

So forgettable it would be as if he never existed at all.

Sherlock never thought, not for a second, that he could walk from their minds onto a grassy hill.

A silhouette of a man walking towards John.

And John-

John falling.

John. John is brave. He is the bravest person Sherlock has ever known.

He wouldn’t jump- wouldn’t fall unless…

Sherlock can’t blame him.

When he closes his eyes he can still see it.

John falling.

And his heart stops and he wants to scream and cry and hold on so tight that they would be the same person because he cannot imagine a life without him.

But Sherlock doesn’t blame him.

If it was the man, John’s man, Sherlock’s man…

He would have jumped too.


	33. Chapter 33

The man in front of him fidgeted as if denied the burden of the child in his arms he was unsure of what to do with himself.

Even after John had been coaxed away from Sherlock and onto the nearby temporary gurney Sherlock had remained in the Detective Inspectors arms, as much by the child’s need as the adults.

Mycroft had watched it all on CCTV.

Sherlock’s hand fisting into the nondescript coat, letting his legs and back be supported by unfamiliar hands.

It would be surprising if the stroking of Sherlock’s back and hair was anything more than unconscious, a protective instinct on the Detectives part. Both of them half in shock. John was doing the best of all of them.

Mycroft stood in the center of the empty room, leaning casually on his umbrella, the wood of the worn handle like an old friend in his grasp. It seemed appropriate for this dark and musty building, these rooms where water leaked through walls and hid in dark corners as if it were a living thing.

He had not used his umbrella as a prop for years and it felt a bit like traveling through time, like he had fallen asleep and only now woke up to find it had all been a dream.

Carefully, he assumed the stern yet apathetic face that so well suited his features and masked his intentions, knowing his silence and easy posture would be…intimidating. The smooth handle of the umbrella lent him old strength, something to hold onto when all he wanted was to rush to his children. To be the one to hold Sherlock until he stopped trembling, to be the person who John grabbed onto with the hand not clinging to Sherlock and held just a little too tight.

The man in front of him settled his hands finally into his pockets and glanced back, twice, at the door from which he had just come, the door which two little boys still lingered behind.

Mentally Mycroft rebuked himself.

No one should feel comfortable enough standing opposite him to turn their back.

A slight miscalculation.

The Sherlock factor.

In years gone by this impossible variable had been one stemming from fear and, occasionally, assumed omnipotence on the part of his brother. When through action or reputation Sherlock seemed to criminals as dangerous as Mycroft himself. It had been a factor that had worked to his advantage keeping his baby brother safe, to keep undesirables away or in carefully measured places.

Now the Sherlock factor had an aspect of something he hesitated to call love. An unstoppable gripping affection.

He wanted to map it out, to turn blue eyes into a logical formula, to take Johns sweetness and painful innocents and turn it into something finite he could factor and analyze and predict.

Foolish. Fanciful inane thoughts.

He disregarded them.

Detective Inspector Lestrade took another step towards the center of the room, the dark space between them receding, his eyes squinting in thought, so close to some version of the truth that his mouth was open as if he hoped the words would simply spill out of him.

Mycroft had watched on his smart phone the moment the neurons had connected, the single solitary second when he knew it was too late to simply release Lestrade back into the world. The moment confusion turned to blinding epiphany and he curled Sherlock closer against his chest, hand running through dark curls and holding on as if he were impossible. The moment he looked at John babbling sweet reassuring words to Sherlock as if he were a dream.

“That woman-” The words did tumble from Lestrades lips but not as revealing as they could have been. The information was coming piecemeal, like he could not hold it all at once. The knowledge, the data was there but his mind was rejecting it. He gestured vaguely at the door without looking at it, pointing, a man of action; he finds the motion comforting, not an undesirable trait for an inspector. “She doesn’t just look familiar.” He managed at last, eyes widening in realization. “That is Harriet Watson.”

He isn’t seeing Mycroft at the moment, not really. He is seeing implications. He is seeing the police files that stayed on his desk for weeks after Sherlock and Johns disappearance, the files that he pulled out again when they issued their electronic goodbye.

“Divorced. No kids. No close friends and no contact with the only surviving member of her family. There is no way those boys belong to her-” He stops, the words do not trail off. They die. His eyes rest finally on Mycroft, his casual yet alarming stance, the power he wielded so cavalierly to get everyone here, the structure of his face, his eyes. Sherlock’s eyes.

His arm drops back to his side, his expression not the almost manic understanding of a moment ago but with an expression that has become pinched.

His stance evened out, not the man lost without the little boy in his arms but the seasoned Yarder who had seen too much death to play the fool.

“Mr. Holmes.” A statement as much as a question, the tone only slightly looking for affirmation, the rest of it betraying a slow building pain that reminded Mycroft of migraines, of pain that comes in a wave with each rolling thought.

Mycroft nodded once and let the hint of a smile show the truth of it, an olive branch. Normally he would have given no sign, no information, but the man had done well, exceedingly well under the circumstances. Had he not been there at that exact moment…

The Detective Inspectors eyes widened at affirmation, mind already wildly careening down into places a common mind rarely wanders.

For a moment Mycroft felt something like pity for him. The world as he knew it was about to change, to be destroyed, grow and shrink simultaneously to fit these tiny creatures into their place.

A lifetime of beliefs shattered in a single afternoon.

Lestrade took a step back, and again turned his back on Mycroft, towards the door as if it might open and reveal its content to him. His eyes were wide and the pinched look had grown into something more troubled and yet…oddly fond.

“It was an experiment wasn’t it?” He came closer to Mycroft, imploring, oblivious to the fact that another man might find the situation disconcerting. “Did he even know?” His hand came to his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose he took a deep breath to calm himself, obviously restraining himself from turning back to the door and forcing it down.

“How in the hell did they get each other pregnant?”

 

 

John has already fallen.

But Sherlock still wants to catch him.

He wants to pull him into his arms and bring him down the last few inches to solid ground so that they could never fall again. He wants to pin him in place and hold him where he would never be out of his sight, not for a second.

He wants to touch every inch of him and make sure that he really is okay, wants to crawl into his mind and his heart and make sure that nothing could ever hurt him without him knowing again.

He had wanted to scream that the man on the hill was coming. That they had to go. They had to leave now.

Had to keep moving.

Had to hide.

But he didn’t.

In his mind he had been screaming, endlessly screaming for John, screaming about the man, screaming at the adults who thought they were keeping him safe.

But they couldn’t hear him.

Outside of his mind his tears were silent and lost in the frantic tumble of too many limbs, lost as time pressed on headless of the fact that it should have stopped, that everything should have stopped.

Outside of his mind his chest aches, it throbs and it is hard to see through the tears.

He doesn’t know how it happened. But he knows, logically, that John is okay.

He knows that the heartbeat beneath his hand, pressed against his chest, is real, that it won’t stop no matter how many times he watches John fall in his mind. Logically, he knows that the breath coming hot against his face, into his hair, has the capability to produce speech, that John could whisper to him at any moment, that soon he would tell him that he was alright.

But there is a moment when logic can fail you.

He remembers it like a needle to the spine.

A second caught in midair.

Johns voice in the dark, their bodies curled together and the lingering happiness, the revelation of their birthday wishes lingering sweetly on their tongues and his own sickness like a diminished echo behind them, nothing but the memory of a feeling. He remembers Johns brown eyes.

John had whispered what it was like to be alone.

To know how it felt to wake up every morning and know that Sherlock would not be there. That no matter what John did, he would not laugh or smile or hold his hand or brush away his tears when all he wanted to do was cry.

There are times when logic does not matter.

There are injuries that defy physical boundaries, that reach past logic and reach into nightmares and twist at organs and make your heart pound and thump without every laying down a finger in reality.

In Sherlock’s mind it was all happening at once, a thousand simultaneous eternities. And John was not talking. He was not smiling. He was on the ground, in his arms, he was touching his face in the car safe in the policeman’s arms, he was telling Sherlock to smile as the doctors prodded him.

And for one moment.

A moment stretched out in his mind long enough to fill forever.

Sherlock knew what it was like to be alone.

He knew a world where he would have to survive without John or stop existing altogether.

For one moment John was on that hill and the man was coming.

But John was brave. The bravest person Sherlock had ever met.

So in that place that defies logic, in the place so deep inside his own mind that even though they were safe, even though the car was taking them home and John was pressed against him he could see it still.

A second caught in midair.

John jumped. Fell.

And this time Sherlock was here to catch him.

 

 

Mycroft is used to this. The cold drawn out silences where his mark is trying, struggling to keep up, to catch up and grasp at the pieces Mycroft holds seemingly effortlessly in his hands. He understands the power play, he knows the steps as if it were a dance he could perform in his sleep. He knows how to make quick evaluations, instant decisions that will affect everything, will affect a life, a country, the world. He knows how to take a constant flow of information and without pausing for breath or a cup of tea make a decision that incorporates the new data seamlessly.

He never has that moment after a conversation to think, foolish, of course this is what I should have said.

He knows to caulk his head to the side in a gesture that seems both falsely intimate and slightly demeaning as if he could see the entire universe, every nuance and grand scheme simultaneously and the result was him.

“It seems I owe you my thanks.”

Lestrade looked tired. Spent. His shoulders slumped beneath the weight of the accumulation of old and new burdens. His posture was that of a seasoned soldier at the end of a war, not at ease but softly defeated.

His eyes still flicked back to the door.

“All I did was be in the right place at the right time. We were just lucky I was there.” The words themselves coming from another man would have been overly modest, an attempt to diminish oneself in order to acquire praise, but from the Inspector they were simple observations. His speech held the honesty of the otherwise preoccupied.

He looked back at Mycroft with obvious effort, away from the door, away from thoughts of the two little boys who should not exist at all.

Mycroft almost wanted to smile the way he had wanted to with John all those years. Pleasantly surprised.

Had Sherlock chosen the people around him knowing that in some respects they exemplified the best of humanity?

Had he known at all?

Mycroft swallowed the pain that rose in his throat and crushed his heart with the grip of a stone hand.

“I have found that there is rarely a thing left in this world which can be contributed to luck.”

Brown eyes regarded him thoughtfully, dissecting the implication, no doubt considering his recent reassignment to parks, to the places in which children dwell.

He did not choose the most obvious path of anger. Good. That would have been dull. Counterproductive. It would have negatively effected his imminent decision.

“So they are alright then? They are…” a pause. Hesitation and then, as if the word were inadequate, as if it held the wrong weight, “…happy?”

Mycroft was not sure who the Inspector was asking after. Sherlock and John of course, but which pair?

The children themselves? The boys who inhabited his every waking moment, who had come to create in himself a man he had never thought could exist.

The possible test tube babies? The mixture of two volatile sets of genetics?

Or the adults who lived on now only in memory and fairytale?

“Yes.”

The inspector nodded as if it were what he had expected but could taste the hollowness of the word, as if it were a white lie with a glimmer of hope fashioned to protect them.

He nodded as if he was trying to believe him.

Perfect.

“You want to see them again.” It was not a question and neither of them pretended it was.

Mycroft picked up the tip of his umbrella and set it down again a quarter inch to the right, staring at its tip, making the move seem deliberate and unconscious. A decision.

“I have a proposition for you.”

 

 

It took ages. Weeks. Years.

But he did it.

They were alone.

At last.

Finally.

A soon as the door clicked shut behind them- even as Nana’s voice still came muffled through the dark stained wood, Sherlock pulled John into his arms.

Enveloped him.

Wrapped him in his arms and then did it again, rearranged their limbs, unsatisfied.

He pulled at cloth and hair and arms and placed John’s arms around him, made him hold him and then it happened.

John melted into him.

Collapsed into him.

And it was enough.

Sherlock held him up.

He was quiet. Too quiet to hear but that was okay because he was still talking.

He was still John.

Still with him.

Words could come later.

Words could lie.

Nana called through the heavy door again like she was speaking to them from another world, the doorknob turned slightly.

Sherlock clutched tighter, held John so hard that his ribs ached. He lifted his head, his chin resting on Johns blond hair, Johns breath on his neck.

“Alright!” He yelled wanting to lock the bathroom door but unable to let go.

“We are alright!” The doorknob twitched silently.

She had let go.

“I have him!” Sherlock called.

Footsteps leading away. Hesitant.

But John was his.

“I have you.”

A whisper this time, pressed into soft hair as he lowered his head to whisper in his ear.

Johns lips moved against his skin, mumbling. A thanks probably.

Safe regardless.

Sherlock pulled back.

He needed to hold on. To pin him down. Keep him safe.

He needed to see.

John stood on his own, brown eyes watching, marking every motion. Not lost.

Not broken.

John didn’t fuss as Sherlock pulled his shirt roughly, desperately over his head and let it fall in a heap on the tiled floor.

Not hurt.

John wasn’t hurt.

He was dirty and stained with dust and coffee and his fingers curled and uncurled in the fabric of his pants, but after all that. After falling.

He was okay.

Sherlock pulled him into his arms again, crushed him in his arms, and it was better this time.

He was warm and his skin was soft and real and human and just as he was going to wrap John’s arms around himself again, to remind John to hold him, John did it himself.

He was smiling against Sherlock’s cheek, wrapped his arms around Sherlock’s middle, crushing them together, dirty clothes and pale skin pressed tight together.

“It’s okay.” John whispered, holding him close. “I have you too.”

 

 

“And I will have my normal working conditions back? No more park details? No more mysterious orders from the top sending me half way across London and away from my caseload?”

Mycroft refrained from commenting on the status of the cases currently under the jurisdiction of the Detective Inspector. Four of the rather pedestrian murders would have been solved by Sherlock without bothering to leave the flat, two he would have taken an active interest in if only to have an excuse to run about the city with John but he would have known the outcome none the less without the effort of doing so.

Lestrade however did not have the luxury nor the tragedy of being Sherlock Holmes and so the cases were taking rather more time with him being continuously dragged away.

Mycroft made a mental note to make at least three of the cases disappear with the solution and Lestrades signature perfectly signed on the bottom. He was after all handling this remarkably well.

“Yes, of course.” His face remained carefully blank, as if none of this was truly of any consequence to him, as if this were all a mere trifle. “So long as you are willing to aide in this manner I will see that you are returned to your normal duties.”

The Detective inspector straightened out his body, his hand drifting over his pocket, checking his wallet and phone in the unconscious manner of someone about to take their leave and then turned his attention completely back to Mycroft, his mouth already forming the words, the question on his face.

“A coach? Like a little league footballer coach?”

“And a chaperone to other such activities when I am unable to join them, no more than a few hours a week. Do not put it into your mind that you are getting off too easily. I am asking you to make sure that these boys are not only safe but interacting at a proper desirable level with children of their own age if not mental aptitude.” Mycroft let his head tilt four degrees to the left; it made him come off more…friendly his assistant had told him. “You do remember what Sherlock and John were like with their age group at the Yard?”

Lestrade nearly laughed a stifled chuckle really, and shook his head, eyes always drifting back to the door from which they had come. He looked sad suddenly, as if remembering the men he had known and the boys he had just met.

“They are gone aren’t they?” He nodded towards the door.

Mycroft did not ask whom he meant.

“Yes.”

Lestrade nodded as if it was exactly what he expected and shoved his hands deep into his pockets, an unconscious sign that he was not afraid or at very least too preoccupied to know that he should be.

 

 

When they were finally done, when they had washed the every trace of dirt away from each other’s skin and the water had grown cold and Sherlock could almost believe that everything would be okay they ventured out into the world of their home.

They had followed the sound of voices until they found Nana and Harry sitting together, two cups of tea nearly untouched before them, Harry shaking so slightly that had she picked up her cup she may not have notice the cooling liquid slosh at all.

The women smiled as they walked in, not as if they were happy, not the simple smile of unconscious pleasure, but as if they had been caught red handed and guilty. The smile that said that they had been the topic of discussion, the smiles that meant that despite being grownups and powerful and free of nightmares that fear still coursed through their minds.

That they still perceived danger.

John didn’t see any of this of course.

John saw only how Harry had moved her entire body unconsciously, the way her hand had moved ever so slightly as if to reach out for him. John only saw that she needed him.

Sherlock felt Johns hand drop from his own, watched as his fingers slipped from his grasp as his arm fell limp and empty to his side. He watched as John crossed the room alone and half climbed and was half lifted into Harry’s lap, her arms coming around him.

Sherlock did not move.

He did not watch as John reached playfully for Harrys tepid tea, just to make her smile, just to coax a cross look from Nana who would not let them have tea without adding half a cup of milk first.

But Nana was not watching him either. Not really.

But they were of course.

They were the same that way, him and Nana. They would never really let John fall completely from their sight.

But for now John had his cup of strong bitter tea without comment, slightly lost as to what to do with it now that he had it undeterred.

Nana was watching him.

She did not have that fake smile on, the kind Sherlock hated and everyone seemed to wear like a badge of pride. She was not smiling at all.

She looked sad. She looked…old. Not the kind of old that makes you slow and dissolves your body, the kind of old that makes is seem like she could understand everything he could tell her, like she had seen so much life that she would understand everything he had seen because maybe she had been there too. She always had kind eyes, Nana, ones that made you want to tell her, or to lose yourself in her arms.

He did not watch as John took a sip of tea and made a face of distaste, he did not watch as Harry held him closer because the smile of fear was brittle and sharp at the edges of her mouth.

“I want Mycroft.”

John put the tea down and Harry turned to look at him and he did not know why he had said it but now that he had he did not want to stop.

“Please.” He was talking to Nana. Just to Nana. She would understand. She would make it okay. “I want Mycroft.”

Mycroft could make it okay.

Mycroft could always make it okay.

The words he never said to John.

The fear in Harrys smile.

The man on the hill.

The man that comes in the dark in nightmares, when no one can hear you.

The way he can understand people and things as if they were books even when he does not want to.

Mycroft would make it all go away.

“Nana please.” And he was begging. He was going to collapse. To fall down into darkness and never get back up because he understood everything and nothing. The whole world at once. Everything-slipping through his mind.

Nana did not smile. Nana was easy, she was real. Nana never lied to him.

He had needed her to smile then.

“He is not home yet Sherlock.” Sweet and understanding and so very sad.

The tears welled in his eyes and he wanted to scream but the words were dying in his throat.

He needed-

He was not watching John, his vision blurred with hot tears he could feel running over his cheeks. But he could feel John, know he was coming closer, coming to comfort him the way he had in the bath, the way he had with Harry. But he didn’t want it.

He couldn’t stand it.

It was too much and not enough and he couldn’t see through the tears the people around him but instead he could see everything else.

The man.

John, falling, jumping, leaping from the edge.

A hand grabbed and held his, small fingers entwining, tangling hopelessly with his and he could not stand it. The desperate squeeze of his hand.

How could he know so much about everything he shouldn’t, people he had never met, places he had never been, but not know what had made John, his John jump?

Not just the man like he had thought before.

There was something else. Something wrong.

Something John was hiding from him. Hiding behind his eyes where he hoped Sherlock would not see it.

He tore his hand away viciously, wanting it to hurt, wanting the separation to be painful, like part of himself was being ripped away. He wanted to hear John in pain for want of him.

But he couldn’t stand it, the second he pulled away, the second he was standing alone.

He needed it back.

Needed more.

He was falling and he couldn’t breathe.

A million useless details swallowing him whole.

The couch on which Nana sat, the wood but not the upholstery, the scene of a murder, with a knife. She had been carrying his baby, a mistress more likely than a wife.

The cleaner sweeping dust under the far carpet, with a limp, car accident. Worse when it rains.

Scar running up the inside of Auntie Harrys arm. She had a man too. Her man, her father, he died. Killed. Murdered.

The person who set the windows-

The portrait on the far wall-

He can hear them, all of them. Time doesn’t quite facts. They scream at him, each wanting to be the only thing in his mind.

Nana had children of her own-

A girl? No. A boy-

John caught him. Held him up, arms tight around him, pulling him back together, forcing him to be held, hands tight around his arms.

Sherlock looked at him. Saw him.

No facts. No ideas. No logic.

Nothing.

“What is it? What did he say? What did he do?” It was a cry, a scream, and a whisper.

John tried to move, tried to pull him into a hug but Sherlock wouldn’t let him, he needed to see. Needed to know. If he knew he could focus and the rest would stop! He just needed-

John was shaking his head, trying to hold him, to be gentle.

John was trying to protect him.

“It doesn’t matter.” John pleaded.

“John!” His mind was melting. It was there. The information on the edge of his mind, demanding to be known, thick and poisonous and sharp. Acid in his mind.

Nightmares come to life.

John was shaking. He didn’t want to remember. It hurt. He was afraid.

He was afraid for Sherlock.

Didn’t he understand that they could never hide anything from one another?

Didn’t John know that he was part of Sherlock?

“Please-” He couldn’t breathe. He was drowning.

 

Mycroft watched as Lestrade was led to one of his cars, the phone in his pocket vibrated silently against him.

Sherlock needed him.

He looked back just as the tinted windows shut, hiding the look on the Detective Inspectors face. A look that might be given to a god, to the omnipotent, to someone who knew all the moves before they happened.

Mycroft thrust his phone into his pocket and made his way to the waiting car, fear boiling in his blood.

He wished he still felt that way. Powerful. Omnipotent.

He wished he knew who had sent the order to send D.I.Lestrade to that park.

 

And John broke.

John shut his eyes against the words that came dead and emotionless from his child voice.

“gottle’o gear gottle’o gear gottle’o gear.”


End file.
